(via Jerz’s Literacy Blog) This is a pretty interesting post explaining the way that one college professor used and plans to use blogs with his students.
My goal last year (or really in late 2002, when we did the technical work) was to create an approach to blog courseware that assumed students were full members of blogging communities. Here’s a breakdown of the approach.
I swear, every time I read something like this I get wistful at the freedom post high school types have to experiment and play with these technologies. Not to say that K-12 teachers can’t find really useful ways to employ blogs, but it just seems like there’s so much more to think about on this level…
ExpressionEngine is only a few months old, but based on my experience so far, it’s powerful and fun to use. I’m running these sites with EE:
Michiana Chronicles, a collection of weekly radio essays (I’m still filling the archive): http://www.mchron.net/ee/radio
ADP/SB, a blog and op-ed site for I. U. South Bend devoted to the quality of American democracy and the character of active citizenship (I’m still adding features to this site, too): http://www.iusb.edu/~sbadp
I’ll have 40 students using EE this fall, so I’ll report back later.
I see that I commented in the wrong box with my remarks about ExpressionEngine — sorry, Will. Your piece here, though, about being wistful over the greater freedom of post-K-12 classes to experiment with these technologies catches my eye, too. You’ve written about this before, and I’ve tried to keep the problem in mind. I thought of it as I learned the features of the ExpressionEngine software, which has at least two ways of restricting access to posts. The first is by having classes of members and limiting viewing of some posts by those classes, and the second is by having classes of posts that can be used to control viewing. I don’t know if Manila will do either of these things, and I do know that most schools aren’t going to be switching software, but as flexible features like these become more common, they will drive other companies to adopt them and will give teachers much more choice as they shape sites with their students. Students might ordinarily post in an area only viewable by their classmates, for example, but every day or two a board of students might use a course editorial policy to choose which posts to open to a wider audience. Just a thought…