Blog Posts, Articles, and Reports To Read: March 2013

• “The Four Student Archetypes Emerging in MOOCs“
• “Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States“
• “Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A (Revised) Graphical View“
• “Who’s afraid of the big bad MOOC?“
• “Beyond the Buzz, Where Are MOOCs Really Going?“
• “The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education“
• “Digg Will Build RSS Reader“

eLearning Blogs

I recently ran across two lists of elearning blogs: “Instructional Design and E-Learning Blogs” and “Top 50 Blogs for e-Learning Tools and Tips.” I thought I’d include here a list of the related blogs and magazines I read regularly:

• Corporate eLearning Stratebies and Development
• e-Learning Online
• e-Literate
• eLearn Magazine
• eLearning 2.0 Technologies and Concepts
• e-Learning & Distance Education Resources
• The eLearning Coach
• eLearning Learning
• eLearning Technology
• elearningpost
• Experiencing E-Learning
• Kapp Notes
• Online Learning Update

StartPages

This semester I’m having my ENG 1020 classes at Metro and my ENG 122 class at Red Rocks use aggregators to track RSS feeds of news and blogs that they find in the process of their research.  I debated between having them use aggregators like Bloglines, which I use, or startpages like PageFlakes.  I decided that my students would probably enjoy setting up a startpage rather than using Bloglines.

I created an account on each of the following startpages and tested them, with the following results and conclusions:

• mysurfpad.com–I couldn’t find a web address specifically for my page, which eliminated it as a possibilty immediately.  I need to be able to see my students’ pages.
• Netvibes (my public pages)–I have separate public and private pages, which makes it too complicated.
• Pageflakes (my public page)–Apparently each page has to be made public individually, which again makes it too complicated.
• Protopage (my page)–When you sign up, you can designate your page as public or private, which is much easier than either Netvibes or Pageflakes.  It’s also easier to create widgets with RSS feeds.  It seems to have a good help section, but I wish I could find some tutorial videos in English for my students to use.

I’ll definitely be using Protopage for my classes.

My Twines

I joined Twine more than a year ago, but I didn’t get around to exploring it until this week.  I’ve joined the following twines, “interest networks”:

• 2.0 World
• Educational Technology
• learning_with_web2.0
• Online Education
• Search
• Search and Discovery
• Social Media
• Star Trek
• Twitter Guide

I subscribed to RSS feeds for all of them and tried out the bookmarklet, which doesn’t seem to allow the user to specify which twine to add the item to.

I can see how Twine could be useful for my second-semester composition students.  They could find or create twines related to their research topics.

About Face on Facebook

I finally joined Facebook last weekend.  I’ve been looking for family members and old friends.  The first person to respond to my friend request was my nephew who is in tenth grade.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I just finished following the instructions on the following video to set up the Twitter application in Facebook:

If this works, every one of my blog posts will show up twice on my Facebook wall because I have HootSuite set up to automatically post updates from my blog’s RSS feed.

I used a new picture of Floria for my profile in Facebook:

Purple isn’t my favorite color, but I do like lilacs.

Resources for Using Bloglines

Yesterday I was showing someone how to use Bloglines, and I thought it would be a good idea to collect some resources for using the service.

Websites:

• “About Bloglines“
• “How To Make Bloglines Work For You“
• “RSS Readers:  Bloglines“
• “How To Use Bloglines“

Videos:

• “Using Bloglines“
• “How To Use Bloglines – 1“
• “How To Use Bloglines – 2“
• “How To Use Bloglines – 3“
• “How To Use Bloglines – 4“
• “How To Use Bloglines – 5“
• “Reading RSS Feeds with Bloglines“

Presentation:

• “How To Use Bloglines“
  

New Addition to Recommended Reading List

I’ve added Ellyssa Kroski‘s Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals to my Recommended Reading list.  Even though it’s written for librarians, it’s a good introduction to web 2.0.  She has chapters on the following:

• web 2.0
• blogs
• RSS and newsreaders
• wikis
• social bookmarking
• photo sharing
• social cataloging
• video sharing
• personalized start pages
• social networking software
• vertical search engines
• social news
• answers technology
• virtual worlds
• productivity tools
• podcasting
• mashups

I do have a couple of objections to her classifications:  (1) She included Second Life in a book on “web 2.0.”  To access Second Life, you have to download their software; it cannot be accessed on the web (i.e., by using a browser).  Therefore, in my mind, it doesn’t belong in this book.  (2) She included Ning in a chapter on “Mashups” when it clearly fits under social networks.

Proposals for 5C’s Conference

I submitted two proposals for this year’s 5C’s Conference (Colorado Community College Conference on Composition):

PROPOSAL #1

Title:  Weblogs and Bookmarks and Feeds—Oh, My!

Abstract: What is Web 2.0? For that matter, what was Web 1.0?  Will there be a Web 3.0? What are weblogs, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, and wikis? Where can I create, find, or use them? What options are available? Which ones are best? How much do they cost? Are they hard to use? Learn the answers to these questions and more along with ideas for using these tools in teaching research.

PROPOSAL #2

Title: Beyond Google: Oodles of Internet Search Tools

Abstract: How many of our students start a research project with Google—and end it there? In this session, we’ll explore other search engines, metacrawlers, and web directories, as well as tools to find invisible web content, blogs, wikis, web rings, listservs and groups, and message boards and forums. I’ll share an activity you can use with your students to evaluate different search tools, and we’ll talk about how to keep up to date with the latest in internet research.

I hope one of them is accepted.

Technical Writing and Web 2.0

The theme for the January issue of Intercom was technical writing and Web 2.0. The best articles were “Writing and Web 2.0,” “Podcasting: A New Layer of Communication,” and “Using Wikis.”

In “Writing and Web 2.0,” Keith Hoffman discussed social networking, AJAX-based web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS, as well as web-based word processing. There are several items in his list of “Suggested Readings” that I’d like to look at.

The authors of “Using Wikis,” Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny, along with M. Katherine Brown, have used a wiki, It’s a Wiki Wacky World, to write a book titled Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools. I bought a copy of their book, along with copies of Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration by Jane Klobas, which I’ve already read, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Change Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

These should be useful for the formal report assignment I’m planning for my technical writing class.

I decided that to find time to read these books and others related to my work, I had to stop reading the murder mysteries I was getting from the library.

Inspiration for Teaching and Blogging

In November I read Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. At the time I was thinking about changing careers, but this book inspired me to continue teaching. In the book, Richardson covers

• the read/write web
• weblogs
• wikis
• RSS
• social bookmarking
• images online
• podcasting and screencasting

What got me most excited was reading about blogs, wikis (which I’d only learned of a few weeks earlier), and RSS feeds and the ideas I had for using them in my classes, particularly the research writing classes (particularly ENG 122 at Red Rocks) that I frequently teach.

Unfortunately, I’m not scheduled to teach ENG 122 this coming semester, but as soon as I do again, I want to use what I learned from Richardson by having the students create and maintain their own blogs to record their research and establish an account where they can track RSS feeds from sites relating to their topics. I’m also thinking about creating a class wiki about research, from generating research questions to documentation styles but focusing on reviews of search engines, metacrawlers, directories, and other internet research tools. When I taught ENG 122 last year, I had the students demonstrate search engines and metacrawlers in class. I want to expand that assignment in the future to include, at least, directories, and to have the students in groups develop criteria for evaluating research tools, select the best examples, demonstrate the ones selected, and record their decisions and reviews in the wiki.

I also intend to establish a blog or blogs for the on-campus classes (as opposed to online and blended/hybrid) I teach to communicate with students. There are a couple of full-time faculty members at Red Rocks who have their ENG 121 (essay writing) students create blogs, but I’m not ready to go that far with my classes this semester: ENG 090 (developmental essay writing), ENG 121, and ENG 131 (technical writing). I do think it would be appropriate to do something with blogs and wikis in my technical writing class; I just haven’t figured out what.

As a result of reading Richardson’s book, I established an account with Bloglines to keep track of blogs related to my work. I also created an account with Furl, but I decided to switch to del.icio.us and will be closing out the Furl account. I used to have a lot of bookmarks for my classes (primarily research related) in an account with MyBookmarks, but when I didn’t use it for a few months, it was closed, and I lost all the links I’d collected. At least with del.icio.us, I can backup my bookmarks. I think the tags are interesting, but I’d really prefer a more hierarchical method of organization: folders within folders.