Notes for CET’s January 12 Workshop on Social Software for Educators
INTRODUCTION: A Brief History of BG’s Classroom Blogs
A non-techie writing and lit teacher turns to blogs in the fall of 2001. Why?
—Writing Divide Within Students
Dynamism and inventiveness of their communications via IM and email versus the formulaic, static delivery of their academic papers
—Social/Academic Divide Within Students
Collaborative learning opportunities (learning as an essentially social activity) that extend the reach of the classroom into their non-classtime lives (integrating the parts of their lives)
—Active Learning=Contructivist Learning vs. Passive Content-Absorbing Frameworks
Knowledge Production within a collaborative community prepares students for the realities of the current workworld
EARLY USES
Fall 2001 First-year Seminar Contemporary Ireland through Fiction and Film introduced a blog as the centralized locus of course activity that served as a budding CMT for content delivery, updates, discussions, feedback loops and experiments in in-class writing prompts. The blog brought the world to the classroom and the classroom to the world as students interacted with professionals in the field.
RANGE OF 2004 USES
The explosion of blogs and CMTs and hybrid tools make it possible to tailor social software uses to the specific needs of a school, a teacher, a course, and a student.
Most Middlebury faculty use our home-grown, open-source CMS tool, SEGUE. Several use SEGUE in conjunction with a Movable Type blog. Very few do what I do, which is to use blogs only.
Examples of a Blog/Segue combined use:
Mary Ellen Bertolini’s Writing Workshop, Level One Course (WP100):
Segue for the kinds of materials that do not change; i.e. her syllabus, tips, and places for students to publish.
Why add a blog?
Blogs and their fluid, restless “anxiety” mirror education as narrative, a course as shifting and emerging, learning as conversation. The blog promotes several different kinds of writing voices, relective and conversational. MEB uses her blogs to convey information in a conversation that spans the semester:
M. Bertolini’s WP100 Blog M Bertolini’s Peer-Writing Tutor Blog
BG’s COURSE BLOGS
As MOTHERBLOG Courses Use the Blog as Course Locus, Blog Becomes Course Content
HOME PAGES AS COURSE MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Creative Writing Blog Irish Lit/Film MotherBlog
Assignments: A Single Assignment on the Blog Can Create Community and the Seeds of Collaboration, Weave Past Semesters into the Current Course, Use Student Models, while Growing Individual Learners and Writers
Knowledge Tree Assignment and Responses
Students as Experts and Apprentices, Teaching and Learning from One Another; Class Spills Onto the Blog, The Blog Spills Into Class
Marisa’s Formal Response Marisa’s Informal Riff
Pete’s Final Reflection Barrie’s Course Reflection
Efficacy & Emergence: The Public Nature of the Blog and Its Effects on Student Learning
Colleen’s Sense of the Class as Single Entity
Experiments in Collaboration: New Kinds of Multi-Media Web-based Research Projects
Associative Reading/Using Multimedia/Being Blogged
Amanda’s Award-Winning Literary Interpretation
NEW DEVELOPMENTS: MOVABLE TYPE and Arts Writing
Using the Course Blog as Pure Blog and a ‘Zine rather than A Cross Between CMT & Blog: Chaos or Collective Creativity
“Scholarship is intensely creative” –Maxine Greene
Artswriting Fall 2004 Homepage
Writing on the Web promotes an understanding of the relationship of structure and form to style and voice, and to content. The power of the link focuses attention on every word and the relationships between ideas. Multimedia writing extends and enriches the voice and the analysis, offering opportunities for intensely creative, efficacious scholarship on the undergraduate level.
Challenges and frustrations inherent in writing on the Web: Time, Training, Access and Writing in the public eye
Students Take Blogs On the Road and Into the Field
Independent Study Projects Using Blogs Abroad
Students Use Blogs in Service-Learning Mentoring
Fifth-Grade Online Writing Buddies
The Professor Blogs
To explore the potential and the reality of blogging and its demands–the tensions–I started a blogging practive of my own in May 2004 to chronicle classroom blogging experiences, to reflect on the effectiveness of the work, and to explore a virtual professional blogging community.
BGBlogging:Out There in the World
Conclusion: The Blog as Classroom Presence
Additional Resources:
Digital Storytelling
Joe Lambert’s Center for Digital Storytelling
BG’s Notes from NITLE Conference on Multi-Media Narrative in the Liberal Arts Classroom
http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging
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(the new) bgblogging 