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Designing blogs for education

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

September 29, 2004 [6217 views]

This presentation looks at the blogging work that I have done so far and at the design of www.jonathanbriggs.com to incorporate the lessons learned from previous experiments. It is being given to a teachers’ conference in New Zealand.

What is a blog?

• Weblog; a regularly updated journal (diary) on the Internet
• Easy web publishing on any topic imaginable
• Millions of blogs provide a commentary on events and on the Web
• Blogs may have one or more authors
• Blogs are run through software tools or content management systems
• Most blogs allow readers to post comments (including a link back to other blogs)
• Blogs have become the rating system for the Web (Google’s ranking system)
• Variants include photoblogs and moblogs (mobile)

What is an educational blog?

• An additional communication channel between teacher and learner
• A searchable archive of notes and handouts including downloadable worksheets and documents
• Signpost learners to additional resources
• Support questioning and discussion
• Provide a channel for comment, criticism and evaluation
• Open the teaching and learning process publicly to other interested parties

My current work

• Teaching
• Development of ecommerce sites
• Development of an e-mentoring system based on blogging
• Development of political blogs
• Encouraging business blogging
• Embedding research further into my teaching and vice versa
• Providing a platform for educational experimentation

Experiments to date
!!!WWF

• Worldwide Fund for Nature UK
• WWF Forums for Education
• This was blogging before blogging had been invented
• Invited experts at planned times
• It was important to choreograph learner interaction

Nuffield Foundation

• Nuffield Curriculum Centre
• Demonstrated the need for clear voice and identification of an audience
• Component of larger set of web activities including publication

Working with Tom Smith

• Tom Smith’s used to work for Ultralab North, had a sabbatical here in NZ this year and has helped me develop almost all our blogging work!
• Helped define appropriate writing/posting styles
• Showed the importance of valuable content that is worth linking to
• Helped me understand Google “Linky love”

Re.engage.org

• Walk and think like a client (for our own systems)!
• Demonstrated the importance of developing a rhythm
• Sharing blogging with another person can be fun and motivating
• It took time to build trust and develop an audience
• We have had to encourage feedback in our postings
• We are exploring threading posts together on a particular topic
• We have added a function to alert commenters when further comments are added

Shaun Woodward MP

• Labour MP for St Helens South
• Uses blogging as a way of keeping voters informed and listening to their concerns
• Demonstrated the need for sensitive moderation
• Developing different forms of interaction
• Experimenting with different types of content

Kingston University

• Four years experience with using Blackboard
• Learning management system
• We need to put the learner at the centre of educational tools
• We need greater simplicity
• We should opening up the process beyond specific classes
• Need to Focus on key functionality (publishing, discussion, alerting)
• System must be available when learners need it
• We need to design it into the teaching process
• Recognise the importance of readers as well as contributors

e-mentoring

• Brightside Trust, educational charity funded by Astra Zeneca and the Higher Education Funding Council
• Aimed at increasing HE participation among disadvantaged school students
• Puts blogging at the heart of a mentoring relationship
• Mentors/mentees keep and share private online journals
• Partner is alerted whenever posting or comment is added by email and SMS
• Requires careful moderation
• Raises important child protection issues

Hansard Society

• House to Home Live for the Hansard Society
• Experimenting with different methods of contribution (polls, ranking, slogans, personality tests)
• Used viral marketing to drive an audience
• Demonstrated the need for offline commitment

Issues

• Blogging is harder than it looks
• Public versus private conversations
• Moderation of comments
• Providing feedback on progress
• Time based versus resource based materials
• Documents versus pages
• Styles of writing – blog postings versus lecture notes
• Confidentiality of case studies
• Identification of material for a single course
• Reusability of material with future groups of students

Why I needed a new educational blog

• Supporting Kingston University students taking E-commerce or Mobile Business in 2004/05
• IPKO Management students studying project management
• Other occasional courses including Hyper Island
• Conference audiences
• Kingston and other colleagues
• Better than learning management systems currently in use?

Goals for jonathanbriggs.com

• Improving the quality of the learning
• Providing every student with the opportunities to ask questions and to get feedback
• Link teaching activities in different locations
• Enable management of large groups

Features of my educational blog

• Blog – what am I doing? (postings on teaching, work and research thinking)
• Signposting – interesting things I have found (should be more durable than postings and should perhaps change)
• Lecture sessions/documents – should be more durable than postings or signposting
• Comments – all documents should be commentable
• Polls
• Moderation – registered users (students) should be able to comment without moderation, unregistered visitors postings will be submitted for approval
• All postings can have images, links and documents added to them
• Search – faceted results (documents, signposts and postings should be different?)
• Recent postings – allow visitor to step through postings etc in reverse chronological order
• Recent comments
• Promotion buttons (to link to surveys)
• Google ads – limited source of revenue and interesting links – explained as an ecommerce experiment
• Google search terms
• All postings should show how often they have been viewed
• RSS feeds

How do we make educational blogs successful?

• Learn to write for blogs
• Make it a necessity to use the blog
• Set up writing schedule
• Encourage involvement directly
• Reward involvement with feedback
• Use other approaches too
** Surveys
** Quick polls
** Face-to-face teaching
** Clear learning objectives
** Practical activity
• Open to a wider audience
• Understand promotion and Google
• High quality links

Next steps for me

• Run jonathanbriggs.com during this academic year
• Encourage commenting
• Evaluate and improve the tools
• Phase 2 of Brightside ementoring project
• More experiments with business, political and educational blogging

Next steps for you

• Read and comment on my blog and others
• Start your own blog
• Get your learners to start their own blogs
• Share your experiences with other bloggers, software developers and educators
• Enjoy blogging

Recent comments:

On September 29, 2004 at 5:04 AM, Robyn Brown wrote:

I enjoyed your presentation and can see the value of blogging in the educational realm, however I teach 6 year olds and am wondering if you have any ideas or blogs that you can send me to that has relevance to this age groups

On September 29, 2004 at 5:05 AM, ron schlosser wrote:

i attended your session and found it very useful, thank you very much.

at my school, we have been dabbling and experimenting with the idea of using blogs for some time, and i hope - over the summer break - to create a method whereby teachers and students will be able to participate in a blogging system, the aim of which is to facilitate the tracking of learning that takes place in the physical classroom, as well as that which takes place away from there. i think that it would be very useful for both teachers and students to be able to maintain such a reflective log in which they chart their developing learning.

one of the major issues that we have had in the past has been with the appropriateness of input from students, and the idea of pre-moderating is an excellent one, one that i will almost certainly incorporate in the design.

thank you again for a very thought-inspiring presentation.

http://www.gwsc.vic.edu.au

On September 29, 2004 at 6:34 AM, Derek wrote:

Great session Jonathan, the two things I thought I'd like to add to your ideal Blog are these:
*The ability to create and save drafts.
*The ability to file posts under more than one category

One dirty great big Blog for you, your students and the world may prove too big a pond for a class. I could hypothecalise a class offshoot space, linked to the Blog, where members of the class have their own area with links to the postings of others on the site. Create some sort of history, sense of context ('Oh, so this guy is interested in this..." and then you might check out what else (s)he has been doing.

I will come back and visit your blog when your classes get going. - Derek in Christchurch.

On September 30, 2004 at 12:50 AM, Greg wrote:

Thanks for the session at Navcon, I really enjoyed it. I began blogging with students (using the blogger engine) in 2002, with a site I called "Answer Back". The interest from the students was so great that they used to race to submit homework responses, as their work was timestamped as it came into the blog space. In class the next day they would compare time stamps to see who won!

I agree entirely with the importance of affirming input with a response, as this validates the act of blogging whilst also providing educational feedback.

After your talk, I went back to my hotel room and began designing a brand new blog for professional development for my region in Australia.

Cheers.

On September 30, 2004 at 2:41 AM, Rick wrote:

I enjoyed the article, and I have a couple of questions.

QUESTION: In the "Good for jonathanbriggs.com" section, you mention:
• Improving the quality of the learning
• Providing every student with the opportunities to ask questions and to get feedback
• Link teaching activities in different locations
• Enable management of large groups

How do you think a blog will enable you to do this differently from a discussion board or other type of online space?

QUESTION: Where are the RSS feeds you mention?

On September 30, 2004 at 2:46 AM, Jonathan wrote:

Thanks for the comments Rick. The RSS feeds are coming, together with some other ways of browsing the site and integrated polls. My team is very busy with other stuff and have helped me hugely in getting us this far.

The main difference between blog discussons and forums is the proximity of the content to the discussion and the choreography (control) that can be exercised by the blogger. A forum is in many ways more democratic but like a party a good discussion can be difficult to start and manage. I have used both in my teaching and find the blogging model much more effective.

What do you think?






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