Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners

Presentation notes for: "Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners"
Institute for Student Success, Humboldt State University
Presenters: Daniel Fiore, Riley Quarles, Claire Knox, and Child Development Faculty

Riley introduced everyone by saying that the network of blogs (Wordpress) created with the Child Development department began with solving a problem: communication. Claire Knox pointed out that there was learning that they wanted visible to everyone, they wanted everyone participating in the conversations. They wanted the learning to not be locked down behind a learning management system. Resources for the presentation are at the Child Development site for the Institute.

They created a network of blogs to support their program. The network of blogs arose from the users - the needs of the faculty. All of the course blogs reflect the interest and needs of the individual classes. The blogs serve as eportfolios.

The department blog provides calendars, advising, and a link to all of the other classes. The site supports online and hybrid courses. It allows students to feel and be connected throughout the program.

They also wanted to engage alumni in an open site. They are expanding the community to include former students. Students create their own blogs that feed into course and department sites. They are using RSS feeds and categories in Wordpress.

Blog posts help students get to know one another before they work together in the class or in other classes. This has increased the sense of connectedness and community.

The students sign up for a blog at Wordpress.com, send the address to the instructor, the instructor puts them into a plug-in that gathers the students postings that are labeled or catagorized according to the class instructions. The pulg-in automatically pulls in all of the materials that the students tag to the class blog. Instructors and students then comment on the postings.

The blogs allow students to explore topics further. The instructor was using the blog to post more articles and resources and the students began to do the same on their blogs.

Carole said that she is not a technological person but found that Wordpress was easy to use and the program allows the faculty to go at their own pace in using these tools. The blogs assignments were good tools to discuss web presence, communicating online, and our web history. They had conversations about how the blog can represent the student to prospective employers and how what you put online represents you.

They want the students to carry their experiences in the program and their relationships after they leave the program. Learning management systems do not allow that. They want the learning community to continue.

All of the course content from the courses stays visible. Students can look at other classes and see how course materials are related to other courses. They begin to link what they are learning to their other classes. Students can go and look at any courses that they are going to take in the future. They can see how all the courses fit together. Faculty can also visit the sites and find new ways to make connections to other classes in the program. Typically, faculty in purely face-to-face courses might not have that opportunity. The blogs also serve as a community orientation site.

They have also had a lot of discussions about privacy - there are some materials that they put into Moodle (the learning management system). Observations of children or copy written materials,  for instance, need to be kept private.

Even though the environment looks structured, the community created by the students and their comments represents another network within the network - this is like the idea of rhizomatic learning posited by Dave Cormier. There are opportunities here for collaborative learning and team-based projects. Blogs allow students to communicate their processes, to reflect on how they learn. Peer instruction and support can begin in this network and follow them throughout the program (also much like Eric Mazur's ideas on peer instruction). This is also a good example of students learning through their connections with one another (connectivism).

WritingCommons.Org and Community-Based OER Models

Kicking the OERs old school.

I read a great posting at Writing Commons this morning entitled "Flat World Knowledge, Textbook Affordability, and a Call for More Collaborative Efforts" that really echoes my thinking on this. Since Flat World Knowledge is no longer open (as defined by Hewlett and many other definitions of OER), it makes the community efforts around open textbooks all the more important. I have long been a proponent of community developed, vetted, and maintained OERs and open textbooks. Please note that I did not say "I am against business." I am for efforts that are truly open to make open textbooks and other OERs freely available to students. This is not some radical notion - it is a return to the original intent of textbooks which is to support student learning rather than to support "sustainable business models." If someone figures out how to do both, more power to them. In the meantime, we need to support Writing Commons, an online composition textbook.

"We at Writing Commons have been working to provide quality open-access articles about writing and research and will continue to do so. While our materials are not yet comprehensive, we are adding new peer-reviewed material every month. We encourage instructors to email us about any gaps in our coverage (suggestions may be sent to jennifer@writingcommons.org), and we can work suggestions into future calls for papers. And while we have not yet made our open textbook customizable, as had Flat World Knowledge, our site does enable instructors looking to incorporate WC articles into their lesson plans to select and assign material as needed. (See http://writingcommons.org///site-map-1 for a table of contents.) Currently, WC editors are developing an instructional video that will guide users through the site; we hope that this video will help teachers efficiently select the material most relevant to their courses."

These kinds of efforts need our support. I used to teach English and I have a lot of teaching materials and workbooks that I have written that I am planning on contributing time and materials to this community. Please pass this on to others you many know who can contribute materials or time for reviewing materials. OERs from an open community of instructors, administrators, instructional designers is going to be the truly sustainable model.  

Related articles

• Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat (cain.blogspot.com)
• Premium Free Range OER (cain.blogspot.com)
• Open Academics at the University of Minnesota (cain.blogspot.com)
• OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education (cain.blogspot.com)

OER, Open Textbooks, and Innovation

Image via WikipediaIn a recent blog posting from Cable Green, he posted a note on the new grant from the Dept. of Labor which is requiring an open license on all materials built for the grant, which means that the author is attributed but the work is open for others to copy, adapt and distribute. This is "in order to further the goal of career training and education and to encourage innovation..."

 "Innovation" is a fairly recent word. The Oxford has it back to only 1553 in English; "the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms." It is from the Latin "innovare" meaning "to change" or "renew." It doesn't, interestingly enough, imply inventing things out of thin air. It was not always the compliment that it is today. Overly ambitious people, it was thought, were the kind who introduced novelties. As the progression of change in world culture heats up exponentially, we recognize the differences between useful innovation and the mere novelties even if it takes a generation or two.

How does innovation happen? There are a number of theories out there - one that has been popular for a few millenium is the idea of the "Lone Genius." Before the 1780s or so it was based on the idea that an authority, that is "The Authority," often divinely inspired, would spontaneously have a really great idea (consider here of Aristarchus or Leonardo). In the Romantic Era, the "lone genius" was inspired and often slightly insane. He had to be a tortured outsider, (e.g. Coleridge or Frankenstein). But there are a lot of ideas that unfold out of a community. I tend to think that a culture of innovation arises out of necessity (the village needs more food) and then someone looks at other problems the village has (seasonal flooding) and then has an intuitive leap that brings the two problems together into a solution (irrigation). What is the difference between that village and the village that failed? Maybe it is because there are also cultures of dormancy - where folks try to innovate using the same paradigms and tools as they have always used but try to apply them to a radically new problem. Sometimes that is okay for quite a long while. We are basically sending satellites into orbit with 18th century physics. It is working so why not? It will continue to work until we are faced with a larger problem that requires a very accurate definition of gravity.

So what does this have to do with Open Education Resources and open textbooks? One way of looking at the problem of open textbooks is to look at technologies, formats (open and proprietary), and distribution systems.  This is the old way. This is textbook authoring as a product. Products require support from corporations, distributors, editors, vettors, etc. In other words it is centered on the object rather than the act. Where is the innovation? The innovation in all of this is quietly going on around us in colleges like College of the Redwoods where the Math dept. saw the problem of Math textbooks and brought existing technologies together into their community (their department). The innovation is coming from places like Wikieducator where the tools are being created not just to create textbooks, but to facilitate the community needed for the real innovations to come.

At College of the Redwoods, the instructors knew that there was no textbook currently out there that would serve the specific needs of their students: those needs are not just financial although Humboldt County is in pretty dire straights much like the rest of California. Those needs are also the preparedness of the students based on what is happening in the local high schools, and the needs of local business and industry. There is no one but the department that could ultimately vet a textbook to meet those problems other than the community that is experiencing them.

It is my sincere hope that the direction that the OER community is going is not to figure out how to continue to traditionally silo knowledge and information but to inspire the creativity and facilitate the community-building necessary to solve one of the most important problems of our time: access to education. We need more research on how to facilitate open textbook creation on college campuses. There are successful models out there. Lets find out how they work.

I am interested in your feedback on what you think helps create a culture of innovation on campuses today or give us some of your favorite examples of grassroots learning and home-rolled open education resources.


Related articles

• More thoughts on OERs and Open Content (downes.ca)
• Taking OER Beyond the OER Community: Part I (downes.ca)
• California Embraces Open Source Digital Textbooks (downes.ca)
• Student PIRGs' Nicole Allen: Open Education and Policy (creativecommons.org)