Blogs in higher ed 
Student blogs as uni promotion(0)
A number of universities are using student blogs as a kind of “reality ad” for their courses and campus life. Here in Sydney UTS had an ill fated go at it that didn’t really take off but as I noted in another post last year Sydney Uni has a more vibrant project still going. Today [...]
Full Story»Student blogs
I have just finished marking 75 student blogs and 75 reflective essays from this semester’s features course.I had the students posting three times a week in three categories: observations from life, analysing features and feature ideas. This seemed to me like a perfect vehicle to explore observational writing, strong structure and interesting ideas – the [...]
Blogs at Sydney Uni take off
Found an interesting article from the Australian’s Higher Education supplement about Sydney University’s embrace of blogging. It’s bizarre that the most traditional of universities would be the first university in Australia to set up a campus wide blogging project. In May the university set up a system open to all university staff. “I don’t know [...]
Student’s grow-up with blogs
Dennis Jerz‘ blogging project at Seton Hill is the subject of a good profile in the Pitsburg Post Gazette, which he gleefully pointed out to Kairos readers. The anecdotal piece raises a number of key issues about blogging and higher education. The headline “Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer [...]
Gone Carnivalesque
I guess I’ve been buttoned down and not hanging in the blogsphere enough recently but I’ve just discovered the whole “carnival” thing (thanks Clancy here and here). They are great peer produced collections of blog posts around a designated issue. There are some great postings in the recent Teaching Carnivals. Everything from New Kid on [...]
Blogs versus Discussion Boards
I’ve been thinking again about blogs versus discussion boards. I have always been very anti-discussion boards because personally I don’t like them as a reader or user. I find them aesthetically uninviting and their folded in structure always makes me want to give up. But last semester I had students who responded quite enthusiastically to [...]
Blog Talk: Sebastian Fieldler
Sebastian Fieldler in the final keynote contrasted two ideas: innovation/revolution and renaissance. He noted Carl Bereiter’s work that innovations in education are often taken up with great enthusiasm but that most often they do not tgake root, they are not sustained because the resources and frameworks are not built or made available. He contrasted this [...]
BlogTalk Downudner: Conversation and reflection
Ian McColl from UQ gave a very interesting paper on blogging in their studio based IT design course. Lots of interesting things about studio practice (the architecture model) that could have relevance to a journalism course. The studio stream is the defining feature of the two degrees, and students complete a studio course each semester [...]
Blogtalk Downunder
For various reasons I haven’t posted here for a while but I have been busy preparing a paper for Blogtalk Downunder our first homegrown blogger confest. My abstract is below, readers of this blog will recognise some of the thoughts from previous postings! Much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and [...]
Aggregation
James Farmer posts an interesting comment about Steve Krause’s When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction. Krause concludes that email lists were a more efficient and direct way of encouraging discussion in his class. This was largely the product of the directness of the “in-box” contact. Farmer makes [...]
Academic blogging
Two very interesting posts, each with lots of comments, over at Crooked Timber (here and here) on academic blogging and its relationship to tenure processes, publications etc. Eszter began the discussion with a post pointing to similarities with traditional academic journal publishing: one extremely important component of the journal publishing process is very much present [...]
Encouraging Discussion On Blogs
Another good practical tip from Charlie Lowe Try blog discussion leaders. I do a lot of group work, so one approach has been to have each group responsible for posting to the class blog at a different time. Perhaps in response to an assigned reading, or a reading of their choosing. If class is on [...]
Grab-bag
An interesting grab bag of links and thoughts from a morning of blog surfing:Interesting quote about authorship as the “unfolding action of a discourse” posted by Clancy Ratliff in an abstract she’s submitting to a conference: Lunsford (1999) takes up these critiques of authorship and calls for new ways of thinking “a view of agency [...]
Blogging as associative thinking
Clancy Ratliff makes a succinct response to some of the issues raised in the Kairosnews discussion I mentioned yesterday: If your objective is to create a learning community, weblogs can help you achieve it by giving students a space to share their writing with other students in the class, who have the opportunity to leave [...]
Blogs as process not solution
I’ve been following the interesting comments on a post over at kairosnews about “falling out of love with blogging“. I have discovered that my honeymoon with blogs is over, mostly because there really is no room for spirited interaction between my students and myself in the blogs. Yes, I can require that they respond to [...]
Why academics blog.
Came across (via Pink Flamingo’s wonderful links page) a great set of reflections on Crooked Timber in response to a post asking why academics blog. The responses reflect the diverse satisfactions and uses of blogging. Timothy Burke reflects on being a public intellectual through bogging and trying out experimental forms of scholarly publishing: I try [...]