Teaching, Learning, Blogging

"Most campuses have simply bolted new technologies onto a fixed plant, a fixed faculty, and a fixed notion of classroom instruction."

The Center for Academic Transformation. "Problem Statement". The Roadmap to Redesign (R2R). Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. 13 April 2004. .

"The extent to which a student gains the same pedagogical benefit from a printout of your Web resources as from the resources themselves is the extent to which you have done nothing of pedagogical value using the web."

Fraser, Alistair. "Colleges Should Tap the Pedagogical Potential of the World-Wide Web." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 8 Aug. 1999. B8.

The above quote came from a re-print from the author's web site.

Posted by: Karl / 8:15 PM

I thought I discussed Laura Gibbs' blog post about student publishing and Blackboard last semester, but a quick glance at the archives indicates that I was mistaken. Anyway, Gibbs does an excellent job pointing out the limitations of Blackboard as a teaching tool for those who want to use technology to "boldly go where no classroom has gone before."

On the other hand, as John Kruper points out in his blog, it's impossible to ignore what Blackboard can do in terms of the more administrative aspects of class management. Blackboard provides a consistent interface, grade management, assessment tools, etc. that, well, I know I can't do with a blog.

I decided to include some links to free blog publishing hosts. I had trouble creating accounts at LiveJournal and Blurty, but I understand that we are experiencing some intermittent trouble system-wide. I'll try again later. (I'm particularly interested in LiveJournal, because I think their service includes some features, like emailed comments, that might be particularly useful in a classroom setting.) I was able to set up a quick account at Xanga. In fact, Xanga's account set-up was remarkably easy to navigate. I'm not sure I like its user-interface, but, then again, I only spent about fifteen minutes playing with it.

For the past nine months or so this blog has served as a place to collect thoughts about my experience teaching AEGL 101 using laptop computers and wireless access. At that time, the title and description of the blog was as follows:

Laptop 101

"Some thoughts and ruminations about the USCA Student Laptop Pilot, especially the development of AEGL 101-26 in which all students will be assigned laptop computers and provided with on-campus wireless access."

Because that pilot project is over now, I have switched the goal of the blog to a developmental/reflective area for teaching and blogging. My first course of order will be to get things together for Friday's conference here on the USCA campus.

Here is Jill Walker's final definition of a web log for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Considering the audience, I am not surprised to see some of the genre discussion, but I'm not so sure blogs fit neatly (or at all) into the concept of a narrative.