Here is a view from one of my favoriate bloggers, Dave Pollard. It is, as most of his posts are, provocative. In short, he suggests that since blogs are not filling a need, but a want, they are not having the impact one might think.
That may well be what I am observing with the SUNY Maritime Masters blog. The ramp-up in former and current graduate students becoming members of this blog is lower than what I expected.
This brings me to best practice versus popular practice versus what is needed, a theme my students and I have been discussing. Perhaps blogs fall in the popular practice category. I have earlier expressed dissatisfaction regarding tne involvement of business in cac.opony. Maybe that’s true because the blog doesn’t fill business need.
Anyway, we all needed more to think about over the weekend.
Hi James and All,
I think the key is “purpose.” For me, Cac.ophony serves a purpose. I think it must for you too, Jim. Unlike most of the writers here, you and I aren’t employed by the Schwartz Institute, so we must be posting here because it serves a purpose.
Where students or business people are using blogs, it’s because that purpose is apparent to them. And with class blogs, the purpose should go beyond “I’m getting a grade for this.” There should also be some compulsion to share something with others, and with blogs, this so often starts with sharing something we read online (as you just did). Is that a “want” or a “need”? Your post moved me to respond, and I think that’s somewhere between a want and a need.
When we started the blog last year, we were the only CAC blog. I think we still are. This space for people to try out ideas, both with other folks involved with Scwartz _and_ beyond, seems to me to fill a real purpose.
Reply to Kate Moss
Hi,
I agree with Kate - blogs fill a want and not a need. I’m running a blog in my literature class this semester, and to be honest, I’m not sure that it’s offering my students that much. Within the CUNY system, I think that a blog has to find a way to offer something that blackboard doesn’t - otherwise the whole practice becomes a little redundant.
I’m not a big fan of online teaching but I think that offering a blog as an occasional substitute to in-class discussion might be a way to go. I think that for a composition class, a blog can be extremely productive - offering an online journal which can be included in class discussion, but in most “traditional” literature classes, it’s doesn’t function as much more than an alternative space for the blackboard discussion postings.
I think that the drive for blogging has to come from the techno-savvy teacher, who comes into the class with a strong awareness of how this can become an integral part of the class discussion, whether that be in a Baruch classroom or elsewhere. I suppose that the trick is to find a way to apply the techniques we use to foster person-to-person discussion across the internet.
Louise
Reply to Louise Geddes
The appeal of a blog as a teaching tool, to me, lies in its malleability to the purpose and method of a teacher. A rigid tool like Blackboard, while it can duplicate some, though nowhere near all, of the information exchange allowed by a blog, can only be twisted and bent so much. One example is that Blackboard severely limits the power of an administrator to alter the aesthetic so that it reflects what’s going on inside the classroom. This is a subtle but important point; a blog designed by a professor (with help) that looks nothing like anything a student has ever seen before says to the class, this is our space, dedicated to what we are doing in our class. To see real live examples of this, come to our Seminar on Instructional Technology: Blogging Across the Curriculum meeting, November 1 at 12:30 (formal announcement coming)
Blogs, as Louise notes, are best employed as supplements to what goes on inside the classroom. For a literature course discussing, say, Hamlet, this might be a place to link essays, audio clips of dialogue, videos of various productions of the text, to a page where a dedicated discussion of competing interpretations of the text takes place. Blackboard can’t do this (though maybe it will be able to in the future), and this is easier done online outside the classroom in preparation for class than in devoted class time. This is not online instruction in the University of Phoenix mode, but rather the supplementation of what goes on inside the classroom via online media.
Instructional blogging, I’d argue, should be seen as a different animal from blogging-at-large. We are urging the use of blogs as content management/content delivery systems. We are also advocating the use of them, as a class tool, behind the protection of a password. If this gets participants interested in blogging for public consumption, fantastic… but that’s not the goal of our advocacy. We think they’re powerful tools for teaching at the college level, and that they can generate more enthusiasm, interest, and results than Blackboard.
Reply to Luke
To echo Luke and Kate, a blog can be just about anything you want it to be. The term blog often obfuscates the fact that an application like WordPress is not just presenting information in a reverse chronological order, but providing a virtual learning space for quickly and easily integrating multimedia, creating static pages, fostering distributed authorship, cross-pollinating conversation, and promoting discussion. These are not educational wants, but rather necessities for the classroom of the 21st century. We are talking about organizing and presenting content in numerous formats through multiple mediums -in fact the term blog can no longer stand in for the larger elephant in the room: flexible, dynamic, and easy to use content management systems!
Such systems ARE necessary in the age of digital media, and anecdotal evidence to the contrary seems rather short-sighted.
Reply to Jim
This is to catch-up on a number of responses to my original post.
Cac.ophony or better still, the Institute has served a need that I have to become better at what I do. There’s no doubt as to why I pose and test ideas on Cac.ophony, and occasionally drop by to bother Mikhail and others.
And yes, I can see that Cac.ophony fills a real need. That seems obvious, otherwise why would we show?
The bigger question to me as how does one present a blog that appeals to those whom you want to attract? What will our students find attractive in a blog? Which of their needs and wants will the blog satisfy?
Or maybe we just don’t worry about that. We simply make blogging mandatory.
Louise mentions the “techno-savvy teacher.” I reminded here (if my memory of history serves me correctly) of Eisenhower’s farewell speech where he warned of the military-industrial complex. We might be equally cautious of the techno-savvy teacher.
It’s easy to become enamored of all that technology can do. We should not succumb to the seduction. Good technology will not overcome bad pedagogy and listless performance in front of the students.
There is a difference between baud and bawd. One better not count on technology to point out the difference.
We need to be able to view the learning experience through the senses, hopes, dreams, desires, concerns, values of the students. It is our understanding of the world from the student’s point of view that allows us to find the point of connection upon which we can build.
I agree our current institutional systems have limitations. When at Baruch I used Blacboard which seemed to me to be little more than a convenient way to distributed material. At Maritime I use the SUNY Learning Network which allows to me to have ongoing asynchronous conversations with my students. However, I do use my personal website in my teaching because Maritime has no institutional equivalent; I do use Blogger to set up blogs because Maritime has no insitutional equivalent.
But there is another reason for going outside the insitutional boundaries. Less bureaucracy, more speed, more adaptability.
Luke’s comment is particularly provocative. Will we one day be unable to deliver quality learning experiences without the mediation of technology?
Reply to James Drogan