questions of efficiency
August 8, 2006
Right now I am trying to decide if it is better for each section of ENG105 to have their own class blog site, or, because I’m teaching three sections of the same class, keep one site that all three classes reference. If class announcements were to be different from section to section, I could indicate that in the subject line. It might get confusing however. On the other hand, will it get confusing for me to manage three separate blogs while reading sixty-some student blogs plus comments–not to mention all the other elements that the courses entail?
I have similar thoughts about the OPML document that I’ll eventually send to all students in order for them to use flock as an RSS reader. If this part doesn’t make sense, it is because dave of academHacK fame is helping me with the technology end of this little project. He will explain it more clearly, but basically, I will be setting up folders that contain each student’s URL to her/his blog and sending this so that each student will have access to reading her/his peers’ blogs. My thought, though, is to possibly send all three folders (one for each section) to each student, allowing them access to other blogs from other sections (if s/he is so inclined).
August 24, 2006 at 1:15 pm
I’ll be looking forward to see how your class blogging works out, but I’m also curious about your choice of Flock. Flock will be limited to the computers on which its installed. Something like Bloglines, which combines both blog and RSS reader, can be accessed from any computer. Was there some special reason for choosing Flock and not something like Bloglines?
August 25, 2006 at 10:03 am
[...] On that note…there have been a few questions / comments raised about our decision to use flock. Dave has more to say about this choice, as he is handling the technology end of things, but I would like to add to/reinforce his thoughts. It was both a technical/technology choice and a pedagogical one. One of my goals is to have students interacting with the web, finding news sources, assessing them, responding to them, quoting from them. Flock allows them to do this in a very direct way. I don’t want the web to be the thing we are all pushing our students away from for fear of plagiarism. Yes, it is easy to cut and paste, and yes, flock makes it easy to do so, but instead of instilling the “fear of god” (or fear of our policing efforts) in our students over utilizing internet sources, we can work together toward using them responsibly in an open way. I also think the simplicity of the RSS reader feature on flock will be great for my students’ use. (I plan to do a specific (short) lesson on how to read in this unique way–sorting through headlines and excerpts to distill relevant and useful information and then slowing down to read carefully and thoughtfully). I’m sure there are other great programs that allow for this combination of uses (blogging and RSS reader), and I’m welcome to suggestions (I know there are some already appearing on AcademHacK). Again, this is my first semester utilizing these tools and as with any initial run-through, it is, in part, and experiment. [...]