school starts monday!

As of Monday, this blog will become the “official” class blog site for all three sections of ENG105 that I will be teaching. Students will use this site as they would use the announcement board, assignment posting, and syllabus access on BlackBoard (or webCT). I’ve decided to host these blogs directly through wordpress. Although there are benefits to hosting through edublogs (including, apparently, good spam-blockers and the ability for students to collaborate through wiki use), the integration of flock and wordpress makes blogging clean and easy–something that is important to this project. Again, as dave and I have mentioned, one of the goals of this project is to take an educator who is NOT tech savvy (myself) and create a writing course that uses technology to make teaching/life easier, while making learning more fully integrated, communicative, and exploratory. The goal is to make technology accessible and usable by ALL educators and students while remaining true to an open-source model.

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.

And, on that note, I will be following the pedagogical aspects of this “experiment” on my blog, the most cake.