I think the questions being raised by Terry and Sylvia here are vital: the distinction between forums and blogs.
This question was raised by Ricky with reference to the distinction between "threaded discussions" and blogs in the "New to Blogging" thread of our seminar. My answer there may have pertinence here as well. Is it worth duplicating here Sylvia- or is there an easy way to cross reference to contributions we have made in other strands? I will try it anyway :
My answer to Ricky goes like this.
I use both threaded discussions (forums) within my teaching AND blogs. For me they are quite different.
A threaded discussion (provided as a tool within Blackboard and WebCT) provides a (usually) text-only space where a question(s) can be posed and students answer the question in a thread of responses.
EG Tolstoy's Story Death of Ivan Illych his hopeful despite Ivan's agonizing death. Why?
Students will typically answer this question one after the other commenting, expanding, suggesting resources,building on each others observations etc etc... At the end of the day we have created a good resource on Tolstoy's story and we have enabled 20 students to demonstrate their skills of understanding and collobaration.
A blog is a space where someone can first and foremost, create their persona, project an image of who they are, what they like, what they think... and from there they can engage in a whole range of activities from expressing their thoughts on topics dear to them, to sharing their photographs, videos and music, to engaging with a group of like-minded individuals (friends) in vigorous debate. They can also use it as a space where they can develop and store their creative work in a variey of media: image, text, video, sound... A good example of this from one of my students is the LiveJournal of Marc http://ghettoman7.livejournal.com who has been able to develop his literary and artistic talents in tandem ....
so as I see it a blog has a much wider range of possibilities- beyond the merely cerebral and intellectual- to the creative... it is in fact an artistic canvas that can be filled in many individualistic and collaborative ways.....
Do others share this view?
Michael Griffith
Discussions started by Michael Griffith
Hello from Sydney Australia where it is mid-summer, where we have had drought conditions for years and have just recovered from a huge Bush fire AND have had the first decent rain in a decade.
My name is Michael (Griffith) and I teach literature at Australian Catholic University (ACU) and have been delighting in using new technologies to enhance my teaching since the end of 2004. If you click on my name in the seminar description you will find a short biography with a few other relevant links. If you click on my Blog address you will get a first hand sense of how I am awakening my students to their first semester of teaching which starts in a fortnight- you will also get a few shots of what the country is like around my place: go to http://michaelgriffith.livejournal.com.
As in previous discussions I think that it would be an excellent idea for all participants to initially share a little about their background and interests and what they hope to get out of this seminar – so please feel free to begin your contribution by doing just that and maybe raising a question or two and perhaps responding to something you might pick up from this short introduction.
While I am keen to share with you all of my experiences in this field and to get feedback on what I am doing, I am equally interested in questions that you might initiate- so please feel free to start your own threads within this conversation; I am sure it is going to be a fabulous experience for us all.
Might I begin by saying just briefly how all this started for me. Back in late 2004, when our University had just purchased a license for WebCT, I was very excited about the way my face to face classes could now be enhanced by on-line discussions (expanding the limited face-to-face tutorial time) and by a place where text, visual and sound resources could be stored as a supplement to lectures. But what I was really missing and could not find in WebCT at the time was a place where my students could keep a journal of their responses to literature and share these responses with others. Enter Blogging, about which I knew very little to begin with –except I had heard extraordinary reviews about the fresh, immediate, subversive insights that this medium had empowered in the Blogger of Baghdad, giving us first-hand impressions of experiences that would never reach the censored press from either East or West.
So I had in mind a space where students could be themselves, could learn to enjoy writing freely about their reading in the context of their own experience. I also hoped that they could connect with each other both inside and between courses I was running and might even begin spontaneous communities of interest relating to the subject matter. It was a place where I hoped THEIR truth could appear- less strictly under my surveillance/ tutelage, more directly in response to the community of their peers and maybe even less constrained by formal academic language but more in touch with their own vivid and vital language and imagery.
I was thrilled to discover, after this, that gurus in the field like David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/) saw blogging as a tool of a true democracy in which the hierarchies of the media and politics could find a vital antidote. And within my world of an imposed monolithic WebCT I found the insertion of a blogging tool as a nice way of keeping a human dimension well and truly alive; it has proved to be just this.
I chose LiveJournal initially largely because of its name (a Journal that was ALIVE) but after some experience with it I felt it was indeed an excellent tool for what I was looking for. It had not yet got all the hype of MySpace and it allowed for a number of interesting ways to set up students both as individuals and as communities.
What in fact has emerged over the last – more than two years- has been quite extraordinary and I hope to share some examples with you during the next two week….
So that is probably enough from me to begin with; please let us begin our conversation….
:-D
My name is Michael (Griffith) and I teach literature at Australian Catholic University (ACU) and have been delighting in using new technologies to enhance my teaching since the end of 2004. If you click on my name in the seminar description you will find a short biography with a few other relevant links. If you click on my Blog address you will get a first hand sense of how I am awakening my students to their first semester of teaching which starts in a fortnight- you will also get a few shots of what the country is like around my place: go to http://michaelgriffith.livejournal.com.
As in previous discussions I think that it would be an excellent idea for all participants to initially share a little about their background and interests and what they hope to get out of this seminar – so please feel free to begin your contribution by doing just that and maybe raising a question or two and perhaps responding to something you might pick up from this short introduction.
While I am keen to share with you all of my experiences in this field and to get feedback on what I am doing, I am equally interested in questions that you might initiate- so please feel free to start your own threads within this conversation; I am sure it is going to be a fabulous experience for us all.
Might I begin by saying just briefly how all this started for me. Back in late 2004, when our University had just purchased a license for WebCT, I was very excited about the way my face to face classes could now be enhanced by on-line discussions (expanding the limited face-to-face tutorial time) and by a place where text, visual and sound resources could be stored as a supplement to lectures. But what I was really missing and could not find in WebCT at the time was a place where my students could keep a journal of their responses to literature and share these responses with others. Enter Blogging, about which I knew very little to begin with –except I had heard extraordinary reviews about the fresh, immediate, subversive insights that this medium had empowered in the Blogger of Baghdad, giving us first-hand impressions of experiences that would never reach the censored press from either East or West.
So I had in mind a space where students could be themselves, could learn to enjoy writing freely about their reading in the context of their own experience. I also hoped that they could connect with each other both inside and between courses I was running and might even begin spontaneous communities of interest relating to the subject matter. It was a place where I hoped THEIR truth could appear- less strictly under my surveillance/ tutelage, more directly in response to the community of their peers and maybe even less constrained by formal academic language but more in touch with their own vivid and vital language and imagery.
I was thrilled to discover, after this, that gurus in the field like David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/) saw blogging as a tool of a true democracy in which the hierarchies of the media and politics could find a vital antidote. And within my world of an imposed monolithic WebCT I found the insertion of a blogging tool as a nice way of keeping a human dimension well and truly alive; it has proved to be just this.
I chose LiveJournal initially largely because of its name (a Journal that was ALIVE) but after some experience with it I felt it was indeed an excellent tool for what I was looking for. It had not yet got all the hype of MySpace and it allowed for a number of interesting ways to set up students both as individuals and as communities.
What in fact has emerged over the last – more than two years- has been quite extraordinary and I hope to share some examples with you during the next two week….
So that is probably enough from me to begin with; please let us begin our conversation….
:-D