Interesting question that Martha poses about moderating blogs. I am not sure how one moderates a blog. We work with one client who, in turn, works with a number of schools around the country. They are considering having each school have a blog space and the intention is that the blogs would be connected to the dialogue space. Hopefully, when people post to the blogs, it would bring them into the dialogue space. I'd appreciate any further information on facilitating related to blogs as well.
In reply to Brenda Kaulback
Re: Taxonomy of Collaborative E-Learning: Foundations
by Cynthia Alvarado -
I am required by my district to moderate student blogs. We are forced to use district blogging servers and software. It requires that student blogs be sponsered by a teacher, who must moderate the posts. We are emailed the posts automatically and they do not appear until we give them approval. I am in a K-12 school system, so understand why the powers that be are afraid of liability and other problems like bullying. That said, I wish we were allowed to watch things more informally, by just subscribing to the blogs and reading the posts. Little freedom to make mistakes means little freedom to learn.
Chances are that quite a few of them have blogs of a sort already, and know how to make them using outside tools (myspace, nexopia, wordpress.com etc) and can share the how-to with their classmates. Those blogs aren't sponsored by anyone. I'd be tempted to leverage that, somehow. It would make evaluation a little more difficult with the having to go to different sites for each student, but it does bypass the district's enforced ignorance of where the Web is headed.