Higher Ed BloggerCon

The Higher Ed BloggerCon seemed like a pretty cool idea when it was first announced and it’s absolutely fulfilling my expectations, through Day 3 at least. It’s a month long event that features two screencasted presentations a day, and it kicked off this week with the teaching strand. I’ve learned something from everything that’s been posted thus far and I’m really looking forward to what Ewan and James have on tap for Friday. Some pointers so far:

Mark Ott’s presentation on screencasting was good, and the discussion afterwards even better. Take away ideas: Using teacher created screencasts to review material for exams and asking students to take teacher generated podcasts and mix in their own recorded reactions to the content.

Tyler Magee’s work using blogs to connect marketing classes in China and her own students provides a clear framework on how to set up collaboration online. Take away ideas: Creating community like this to study collaboratively takes a fair amount of planning and nurturing, but it pays off in the end (at least in this case.)

Nicole Ellison and Yuehua Wu of Michigan State University shared the results of “from one of the first empirical studies exploring whether online writing offers a true pedagogical advantage over traditional writing projects submitted on paper.” The result? Pretty mixed, and not statistically telling for the most part. Students spent more time on the paper assignment compared to the blog assignment. But generally, students said the blog was a postive experience, and more thought it was a more effective use.

In “Blogs for Learning,” Ellison and Ethan Watrall talk about an upcoming website with online resources for teachers and students who want to engage in academic learning. (The site will go live this fall.) In some primarily anecdotal research that they’ve done, they identified these problems with student blog use:
1. It felt like busy work or a chore because of a lack of interest in the class, time pressures, irrelevance, or a perception that what they wrote was not being read. 2. It was too overwhelming to read all of the posts. 3. They had trouble interacting with other students’ blogs because they felt uncomfortable or because there was nothing of interest to comment on.There is another session on copyright and podcasting that I haven’t gotten to yet. And tomorrow, it’s wikis and nomadic desktops.
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