Teaching and Learning Perspectives with Blogs "Part 2"

Part 2

We have to keep in mind an understanding of blogs benefits and limitations.
Blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology
tool. Blogs can be used for reflection about classes, careers,
or current events; they can also capture and disseminate student and
faculty-generated content. RSS feeds make blog content
accessible through newsreaders, allowing bloggers to increase
the sharing of this information among interested individuals.
Blogs offer students, faculty, staff, and others a high level of
autonomy while creating a new opportunity for interaction with
peers. Blogs provide a forum for discussion that goes beyond
coursework to include culture, politics, and other areas of personal
exploration. Students often learn as much from each other
as from instructors or textbooks, and blogs offer another mechanism
for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and acquisition. In my opinion blogs make our learning fun and interactive. We can choose to participate in many educational discussions about topics that we are passionate about. Blogs often serve as an educational tool for reflection,knowledge building, and sharing.

In educational settings, faculty are using blogs to express their opinions,
to promote dialogue in the discipline, and as an instructional
tool, and students are increasingly using blogs both as personal
commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.

If effectively deployed, wikis, blogs and podcasts could offer a way to enhance students', clinicians' and patients' learning experiences, and deepen levels of learners' engagement and collaboration within digital learning environments. Therefore, research should be conducted to determine the best ways to integrate these tools into existing e-Learning programmes for students, health professionals and patients, taking into account the different, but also overlapping, needs of these three audience classes and the opportunities of virtual collaboration between them. Of particular importance is research into novel integrative applications, to serve as the "glue" to bind the different forms of Web-based collaborationware in order to provide a coherent wholesome learning experience.


I want to share this with you that I found while researching information about teaching with blogs.

Blogs
Scenario

Professor Thomas has been looking for new ways for
students in her International Politics course to connect—
with her, with one another, and with the material.
Knowing from experience that reflecting on concepts
and writing about them helps crystallize her thoughts,
she decides to experiment with blogs. Blogs are personal
online journals that serve to capture thoughts
and comments and post them to a public Web site
for others to read and respond. Blog entries can be
informal and are posted without the approval of a moderator
or editor.
She gives a brief demonstration of the blogging application,
showing the students that it’s quick and simple
to create an entry. Going to her blogging application,
she types in her comments, includes a link to the related
article online, and adds minor formatting. With a
single click, the entry is posted to her blog online.
Each student creates his or her own blog. Dr. Thomas
instructs the students to set aside regular time for
blogging, encouraging the students to write about topics
discussed in class and how events in the news inform
their understanding of global politics. She tells the
class to read each other’s blogs, as well as her own,
and to comment on the postings. In her own blog, Dr.
Thomas models the kinds of blog entries she hopes
students will write, and many of her entries are her responses
to student blog posts.
As the course proceeds, she finds that most students
take to blogging. When she uses a student blog entry
to seed a posting on her own blog, she generates
much more interest among students than had been
possible in previous years. The trackback feature allows
Dr. Thomas and the students to reference individual
blog posts, similar to an informal literature citation.
She also enjoys the community dialogue that
results from others’ commenting on her postings—or
challenging them.
By the end of the course, Dr. Thomas sees that introducing
her students to blogging is a straightforward
and interesting way for them to generate, share, and
keep up with timely and topical class information. They
form rich connections with one another and the content
and—because of the reflection and sharing—find
great relevance in the material. Several students continue
to blog after the course is over. Dr. Thomas plans
to include richer media, such as photographs and
short audio segments, in the blogs in her next class.


Thank you,

Josie Davila

Teaching and Learning with blogs

I have a new interest now, what is it? Well it’s my blog. What do I want to do with it? There are many ways to use it. I have done some research on it and would love to share it with you. You can use it as an online publishing tool to create a website and add content on the Internet. But what’s even more important is that many people miss the wonderful potential that blogs have to connect to people and ideas. Blogging can be used to teach and learn. I am glad we all got the great opportunity to create our own blogs and now enjoy adding more. Let’s all take a good look at what blogs can do for us.

Many of us did not know that blogs can be used as a social and networking tool. We all want others to see and hear what we have to say. We enjoy finding others with similar interests and passions or perhaps in a completely different way. We enjoy reading what people have to say particularly if these are interesting things and discuss topics we care about.

The best advice I can give you, if you want to belong to a successful blog you have to find people and connect with them. Let other people know that you have a blog and are interested in what they have to say, and would like to start a conversation with them.

You can’t just be pretty and wait for people to discover you. The web is a huge place, and there are so many blogs out there. According to recent data there are 70 million blogs. http://www.blogherald.com/2005/07/19/blog-count-for-july-70-million-blogs/
Bottom line if you want your blog to be found and read, you have to create personal connections.

As in all human relationships, creating a blog network is a give-and-take process. Give-in the form of comments, links, contributions to the discussion-and you will receive. Comments and links are what keeps your blog alive.

You can think of blog networking as a simple 3-step process:
Step 1: Create your blog community
Step 2: Visit blogs and leave comments
Step 3: Talk about what you read in other blogs and link to them

A final comment
You may be thinking: “Hey, this is a lot of work!” Yes, it is. Good networking is always a lot of work. You can do just a little bit, but you will find that the more networking you do the more people will visit your blog and will engage in interesting conversations with you. If you feel that nobody reads your blog or leaves comment, it’s time to go out and network. Remember this is a great way to learn more and teach more about great topics that you consider very important. And more importantly blogs are being used to Teach and Learn.

Thank you,

Josie

(Your comments are always welcomed)