jill/txt

[moveable type teaching too expensive]

If you haven’t already looked at Mena Trott’s post announcing that Moveable Type 3.0 will suddenly be, well, rather expensive, really, go check out the awesome list of trackbacks. Customers talk back - on the corporate website. Wow.

I note with amusement that my use of Moveable Type with my students isn’t even on the pricing list - US$699 is the maximum price, and that only covers 20 authors and 15 blogs. I have 55 active blogs with an author each in my installation. Moveable Type handles it, but obviously it’s not built to make administration of that many users and blogs easy, and indeed, it is a pain. I think it’s fine to charge for software, but suddenly going from free (beer not speech) to pay without warning isn’t that cool. And given the software doesn’t work very well for the purpose, that price - or whatever they’d charge - is too steep. There’s no way I’m going to ask my students to install Moveable Type themselves again, so I guess next year’s web design students won’t be using Moveable Type. Anyway, the default templates are really complicated for students to figure out, and there’s the spam issue, which admittedly might be improved with the new version.

Wordpress has been recommended by several (it’s recommended in half the trackbacks to Mena’s post), and it’s GPL which is good. My university’s already installed Simplog (previously called MyPHPblog, and websited here), but with little info about features). Simplog is open source too. It’s simple alright, perhaps too simple - last time I checked you couldn’t edit templates, only choose from a list of presets - but I notice the new version has trackbacks and comments and it would (gloriously) require absolutely no administration from me.

Our university’s committed to using open source software (at least, that’s the theory) so I really should switch, I guess.

[blog review assignment]

I’ve had a few requests for the text and grading scheme for the blog review assigment I’m currently grading, so I’ve translated it into English, all the better to share it and hopefully contribute to this kind of assignment evolving further so I can improve it next time I teach this course. Here’s an English version of the PDF I handed out to the students. For those who don’t like PDFs, I’ve included the text below.

The grade descriptions follow the Norwegian standard, and I’ve tried to write more specific descriptions of each grade for this particular assignment. It’s not a very easy task but I find it useful, and the students seem to like it too. Some of the terms I’ve used are from the SOLO taxonomy of learning outcomes, which I found at RMIT.

The general advice I’ve given as to what students should think about while writing is almost completely taken from Scott Rettberg’s version of this assignment. I’d love to hear any comments - and you’re more than welcome to take this and use it in any way you like.
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[problem]

One of the problems with the grading is that I’m grading blog reviews and so I keep just having to have a look at the blog the student’s reviewed, and well, you know where that leads.

[self-assessment]

My students are submitting their redesigned blogs for assessment this Friday. Here’s the PDF of their assignment, with grade descriptions. Were I assessing my own blog design, I’d give it a C: “Mostly works, but the code could have been planned and organised better. A plan for layout and information architecture seems to exist but hasn’t been fully implemented. Mostly good language and organisation, reasonably consistent layout.” If my statement explaining my design choices was convincing (and you know it would be) I’d probably be able to work my way up to a B. An A would be out of the question because my site isn’t quite valid HTML. “About six hundred errors or so, actually,” my students helpfully pointed out.

[reviewee’s amusement]

My students have written lots and lots of blog reviews - more than fifty, actually - and Bjarte’s review caused considerable joy and amusement as the reviewee and his readers ran the review through auto-translators to figure out what it was about.

[weblog reviews]

Ever thought of writing reviews of weblogs as a class assignment? Scott Rettberg’s New Media Studies class (which I visited a week or two ago, lovely bunch of students) have written a collection of reviews of weblogs as their final class project, all neatly put together and published with screenshots and room for reader comments. The selection is neatly categorised, so you can read about “Classic Bloggers", “Digital Culture Blogs” like Steven Johnson, Laurence Lessig, Mamamusings, Frank Schaap and Jason Rhody’s, or you can browse the students’ reviews of writer’s blogs, persona blogs, group blogs, political blogs and so on.

I only know of one other project where people have tried to collect reviews of blogs: the Peer-to-Peer Review Project, which ran last year, coordinating bloggers reviewing each other’s weblogs.

Rob Wittig’s review of Justin Hall’s links.net is the best review I’ve ever read of a weblog. It was published in American Book Review, in a special issue on new media edited by, yes, again, Scott Rettberg, as well as electronically in EBR. Rob’s review is of course wonderfully written but it also demonstrates the reason why a good weblog review is hard to find: Rob has been following links.net since the mid-90s. He has experienced the weblog in time, the way it’s meant to be experienced, as a serial, persistent, constantly changing site you read now and then, sometimes daily, sometimes almost forgetting it completely. Someone who has a week or two to read and review a weblog is going to struggle to approach this deep reading. I suppose you could say, then, that Rob’s review goes beyond reviewing.

However that may be, my web design and web aesthetics students will be reviewing weblogs next semester.

[ideas]

Jenny Weight’s course on programmed and networked media is fascinating, both for the topic and because there are lots and lots of creative ideas for stuff to do in class with (and without) blogs. For instance, visualise the network, figure out what cyberspace is, find out who actually said “Information wants to be free”, and why, and consider whether the sites you found are authoritative, do the following things in a MOO, figure out what the new scandal about Prince Charles is and discuss why this can be published on the web but not in conventional (or at least UK and Australian) media, and so on. It also provides an example of how you might assess blogwork, along with an inclass exercise because the students will ask what on earth that means. This is similar to the way I did this last semester in my blogging web design and aesthetics course, though my info’s all in Norwegian) and so on.

Nick Olejniczak has opened up a wiki for a class on blogging he’s teaching next spring, and invites people to add suggestions, links, readings and so on to it. That’s great, but what I’d really like is a collaborative wiki or weblog with good categories where teachers using blogs to teach internet-related topics can share ideas and exercises and assessment forrms. What a treasure trove that would be!

[audiochatting about blogs]

I’m going to be audiochatting for a while with Scott Rettberg’s students in half an hour or so, a fortnight before I actually go visit them - I’ve never audiochat-taught/lectured before, so it’ll be interesting. Scott’s New Media Studies class are starting a collaborative class project on blogs, putting together a collection of reviews they’ll write of various weblogs. So today we’re going to talk a bit about how you’d write about a weblog. I thought I’d point them to the Peer to Peer Review Project, where bloggers reviewed each others blogs. I also want to point out the importance of being aware of a weblog’s surroundings. Is the weblog part of a cluster? Who and what do they link to? So I might want to show them Technorati, I guess, and how to do a Google search to find out who’s linking to a site. What else would I want to say? Time, how a weblog exists in time, it’s episodic, you read a little, but again and again, across months and years, if you like the blog. So to write about a weblog you should not just visit it more than once, you should also poke around in the archives. Especially have a look at that First Post, it often explains why the blogger wants to blog. There are other things as well, of course. Design, frequency, style, the kind of things the blogger writes about, etc, etc etc…

It’ll be pretty interesting to see how the students’ project turns out. There aren’t many weblog reviews or critical readings of weblogs out there, and this is an interesting start.

[blogs charted]

Here’s a spatially organised chart of ways blogs can be used in teaching. (via Jon)

[student and blogs]

I’ve made blogs for the Digital Media Aesthetics students, with a mothership linking to the others, where I’m going to try to connect the threads in what they write, hoping to foster conversational blogging and an appreciation of trackbacks. Last semester (in a class on web design and web aesthetics) student’s weblogs counted for 40% of their final grade; this semester the main part of the grade depends on an essay or other sustained project (one pair are planning to build a game) that we’ll be working on through the semester. I’m planning to set aside time for blogging in each class and giving the students very specific tasks in their blogging time, because I want them to have enough experience with this way of writing and working that they can find out whether it’s helpful to them.

Based on my experience last year, I’d say that there are three ways of responding to classroom blogging:

1. You see it, get it instantly, love it and blossom with it. (I’m one of these people)
2. You see it, don’t quite see the point, perhaps you’re quite sceptical, but if you do it for a while you come to find it valuable.
3. You see it, hate it, try it reluctantly and continue to hate it.

The first category is an utter joy to have in the classroom. All you have to do is let them know that blogs exist and they’re off. Nils had redesigned his blog half an hour after I’d set them up - and this was in the evening! I don’t know whether he’ll enjoy writing, of course, but that kind of enthusiasm would thrill any teacher! I was lucky enough to have an enthusiastic blogger from last semester in this semester’s class too, and it was brilliant seeing her explain the pleasures and the usefulness of blogging to other students. She pointed out one advantage in student blogs I hadn’t thought of: she types her lecture notes and so on straight into MoveableType leaving them as drafts rather than publishing them. That way, she has all her notes always available from uni or from home, and they’re searchable.

The second category is definitely the largest, and it’s for this category you need to devise specific blogging tasks and actually spend class time blogging. I’ll post more on what we actually do and what exercises seem to work best as I go.

I’m not quite sure what to do about the third category. There definitely are people who don’t get much out of blogging. But then, there are people who hate written exams or oral presentations, there are people who learn best from discussions with friends and others who learn best from reading or doing. Exposing students to more different ways of learning and thinking and expressing oneself can only be a good thing. There should be a point at which they can opt out of the ones that don’t work for them, though.

[students teaching with blogs]

One thing I’ve really liked in the student weblogs I’ve been grading is that there are a lot of posts that are really useful. It’s so different from exams where only the examiners are ever going to see all the work students have done. For instance, a colour blind student teaches other students and readers how to design sites that can be read by colour blind people (you’ll have more colour blind readers than readers using Opera or Netscape or needing websafe colours or any of those other things we fret about), another student explains how to make skins for your blog, one explains how to use php to join up separate html files. There are lots of comments from other students on the blogs, and questions are asked and answered and there are links to and fro and they’ve just done a really impressive job.

Here are some things I did right, I reckon, in the blogging section of the course:

• Required different kinds of blog post in the final portfolio: an analysis of a website, a reflective/theoretical post about the web and communication, a technical post (which generated a lot of the teaching posts) and an evaluation of another student’s site.

• Did a fair amount of blogging in class.
• Ditto for comments and linking to each other’s blogs.

Of course there are things I could have done better, too:

• Specified just what, exactly, I expected, much earlier in the semester.

• Done more in-class blogging earlier.
• Worked out a less traumatising way of starting blogging than having each student install MoveableType themselves the first week of semester. I don’t know how I’ll do that next spring. It’s excellent that they have control of their own blogs, and MoveableType has a lot of good features that we’ve used since, but it was a really rough way to start the semester and the many students who had problems certainly didn’t feel very at ease with their blogs. Little confidence was gained.
• Done something about the curriculum - I didn’t use it very well. However, students have found and read and written about a lot of other material themselves, and that’s good. Perhaps more of the curriculum can be self-defined by students next time round.

[writing and learning]

Did you know Thomas Edison’s notebooks ran to three and a half million pages? He wrote down ideas, plans, possibilities, drew sketches, visualised his thoughts and wrote about his colleagues’ work. He used words like if, might, would, could and try very frequently and didn’t bother to write correctly. Obviously his note-taking was productive: in 1882 alone he submitted 107 different patent applications. His notebooks have been published and there’s probably lots about them online somewhere, but I’m dialling up from an expensive hotel so no links today.

We’ve been talking about writing and conversation as tools for learning at the university pedagogy course today, and it’s so utterly relevant to blogging. Edison’s notebooks were cited as an example of “thinking writing” (perhaps there’s a different word commonly used in English? the Norwegain is tenkeskriving), which is experimental, exploratory and usually just for yourself. Here the writing process is important because that’s where you learn. Presentation writing is the kind of writing where your main goal is to communicate something you’ve already learnt to other people.

Blogs are in between. Three and a half million pages of notes doesn’t sound that much to a blogger (I printed out all my archives when I’d been blogging for a year, and the pile of paper was a lot thicker than my PhD thesis). Blogging is definitely a place for thinking, exploring, trying things out and learning, and I wouldn’t be surprised if analysis showed that bloggers, like Edison in his notebooks, use if, might, would, could and try more frequently than writers in other genres.

Olga Dysthe, the writing and learning specialist, cited dozens of interesting-sounding studies it’d be fascinating to read and relate to blogging. And she gave a lot of examples of writing exercises to use in classes. Writing is a really good way of learning, and especially writing where you write full sentences rather than just words (apparently that activates more cognitive processes or something, empirical studies show, and I think full sentences forces you to contextualise things more. I’ll have to find that study!). Now, I’ve hardly done the empirical studies, but following that it does seem likely that full on blogging, with its full sentences and linking would be a rather excellent learning tool.

Using weblogs with students I initially thought of the writing as something that they’d do at home or after class. Classroom time should be spent “learning", I imagined, and writing would happen outside. It didn’t take long to realise that most of the students didn’t blog when we kept blogging and writing out of the classroom. Once we started blogging in the classroom, more writing happened outside of the classroom too. In retrospect it’s obvious: if you think blogging’s a good way of learning, you need to demonstrate that by trusting it enough that you spend classroom time on it. In addition, most people don’t “get” blogging instantly. They need time and experimentation to see whether and how it can be useful for them.

I need to complete this pedagogy course to get a permanent teaching position at the university, and for my final assignment, which has to be done before the third meeting, in October, I’m going to write an article about weblogs, writing and learning. I want it to be a practical sort of an article, the sort of article someone who was wondering how to use weblogs in teaching could pick up and think, ah, that doesn’t sound too hard, I’ll use that, and that, but I’d rather do that this way. I’ll start by posting blogging exercises I’ve used, and ones I think I might use, here. Not just now though, it’s dinner time!

[blog-reading Eliza]

In today’s Digital Culture class we chatted with Eliza, the famous computer psychologist, and it seems one of the students has whipped up a blog-reading version of this famous bot, because she commented on my last post, from a UiB arts faculty IP-number, too ;) What a joy such a program would be, eh? A free-range Eliza crawling the web of blogs and automatically commenting every post in true Eliza style: “Why do you say that?” and “How do you feel about your mother?” in every comments field for miles around.

Perhaps not.

[new bloggers]

The New Media Theory students are using the course weblog actively, and even cooler: Wu has started her own blogspot blog, Thinking while walking and some others have set up a joint blog, La Escuelita. The New Media Theory course has a course blog for everyone, and blogging is only compulsory for off-campus students. Even they only have to post three posts and three comments each. My Web design and web aesthetics course, on the other hand, has compulsory individual blogs. It’ll be interesting to see how these different strategies work. I wonder whether the percentage of New Media Theory students who start their own blogs will be the same as the percentage of very successful bloggers in the other class? Perhaps it’s a general rule: 5% of the population have a blogging gene, or something like that.

[evaluating online sources]

Here’s an annotated bibliography on internet addiction with half real entries and half fakes. It was prepared by Trudi Jacobsen and Laura Cohen to teach students how to evaluate the reliability of online sources and comes with a description of how they work with it in class. Could come in handy.

[power]

Snigger. After reading my innocent delight in Matt’s transitions, one of my web design students is fretting that perhaps he should put the transitions back in his site in spite of his better judgement. Luckily, he decided not to. Having your lecturer blog all her whims must be so exhausting for students, poor souls…

[new media theory]

Months and months ago I foolishly agreed to give a few lectures in New Media Theory for the MA in Screenwriting. Since then my busy-ness levels have soared, I’ve realised I’d misunderstood the rates and I’m getting paid a pittance for the job (payment for casual teaching is terrible! I would probably get more per hour sitting behind the cash register at the supermarket!), and I’ve been told that my five lectures constitute an entire 10 ECTS course for these students and they’d like me to provide material so that the eight distance students can follow the course as well, please. Well, they upped the hourly rate an inkling after that, though it’s still miserable, and so I’ve decided to just do the teaching with minimal preparation. Which feels kind of evil, but ya know, I’ve only spent three hours on this so far and I’ve already got a course blog set up with a nice CSSed version of their main tablecentric design and I’ve worked out more or less what we’ll do each class. And it was fun last time I taught there.

I’m going to try just having one course blog, giving all the students accounts and requiring they all post at least three posts by the end of the semester. Perhaps some’ll set up their own blogs but I’m not going to make that a main point of the course - their assessment task is simply to write a traditional essay and the course only runs for a few weeks. I’m hoping that a joint blog will be enough for the off-campus students to be involved.

[talking about blogs in trondheim]

Ruth and Finn have invited me to Trondheim on Monday, and so I’ve been surfing around to put my links together. I’ve discovered if I have more than enough links talking is easy. Writing talks as link-dense summaries is much faster than doing a powerpoint or getting screenshots or writing notes for myself only. It’s more fun, and it makes the work accessible to others - though there’s lots between the lines. Plus it lets me talk as a blogger which I enjoy :) Since the talk’s in Trondheim, the rest of this post is in Norwegian. One day I’ll write it all out properly, in English, as essays or something, I promise.
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[self-assessment]

Of course! Adrian is having students assess one of their own blog posts against the assessment matrix he’s provided. That makes sense! Next time I teach the web design and web aesethetics course (the blogging one) I’m definitely going to set up some kind of mid-semester assessment, perhaps a peer- or self-assessment that counts towards the final grade.

Norway’s just now shifting from a very old-fashioned continental European tradition of distanced lectures by learned professors where students must not ask questions to an internationalised system with Bachelor and Masters degrees, European standard credits for courses, and ABC grades instead of numbers. In the old system all lectures were open to anybody (which was wonderful) and conversely courses were designed so that you could take the exam without attending lectures. This is terrific for those who learn well on their own but less than ideal for most real-life late twentieth century students.

I was brought up in the old system and do you know, it just didn’t occur to me that I could design the course with mid-semester requirements. Lots of other subjects have them now. It’d be easy. Now, students are supposed to be working evenly through the semester, and many are (there’s some really good work in their blogs recently), but there’s still a lot of deferral going on. People not turning up when they’re supposed to be presenting their projects. Silly stuff. This means that though I can ask students to provide feedback to each other, they won’t all do it. (And no, I didn’t always study evenly throughout the semester either. Far from it.)

[forms art blog]

This weeks my students are doing JavaScript forms and I’m racking my head to think of any blogs that use forms usefully, so that I can give the students a constructive and useful task to do with forms rather than one of those “make a form with X, Y and Z and then never use it” exercises. Makes me imagine some kind of forms art - oh, Ian Haig’s My Favourite Babe (which also has an artist’s statement at Rhizome’s art base) uses radio buttons and so on rather amusingly come to think of it, on the third or fourth page I think. Any ideas or links about interesting yet fairly simple JavaScripty blog things?

[a class i’m happy with]

Today’s class was pretty good. First I asked the students to individually read one of four different web fictions for ten or fifteen minutes. The options were Tor Åge Bringsværd’s dictionary story Faen. Nå har de senket takhøyden igjen, Liz Miller: Moles: A Web Narrative, Gavin Inglis: Same Day Test or Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War. Then they discussed the way in which the piece was structured with two or three other students who had read the same piece. I asked them to see if they could draw the structure, and while that didn’t really work with all the works, they figured out some important stuff doing it. For instance, in Bringsværd’s piece there’s an index with links to all the other pages. It’s not the entry page of the site. Students decided that since it was called “indeks” and had links to everything else, that must mean the piece is hierarchically organised, which made it obvious that we hadn’t really figured out what hierarchies are in previous discussions.

After that, I talked a bit about hypertext in general, Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, various systems, the web, hypertext fiction, a brief demo of afternoon, and a sampling of some print “hypertexts". I think I talked for about ten minutes. Yes, it was the short version. Then, after a break (we’d already used 55 minutes) the class regrouped with four to a group and each person had read a different work. They presented the works to each other and tried to work out which, if any, of Mark’s patterns could describe each work. Only two had actually read Mark’s article, and obviously had they read it it would have been easier for them, but they had it on screen and figured some stuff out, and they can read more later. Then I brought out the list of stages of learning we talked about on Tuesday and told them that so far, they’d described and classified, and done a really good job of it too. They’d also started comparing, which is one step up. Another move ahead would be to figure out whether there’s a connection between the patterns in the work and its content (explain causes), and perhaps even generate new ideas based on these reflections.

It all ran smoothly, the students came up with some wonderful interpretations, most of them were avidly blogging their thoughts by the end of the class, and I didn’t even get into a sweat worrying that I had to magically get them to summarise everything in a fancy plenary discussion. I usually worry about that. I’m just so impressed that the students worked so much out on their own. I actually managed to set up an activity where they could do their own learning. Yay!

[interesting blog writing course]

Next semester I’ll be teaching digital culture, which is a survey and theory course rather than being practical like this semester’s web design course. I want to use blogs to focus on thinking and writing, so it will be different to this semester’s installing and customising frenzy. I found some inspiration for thinking about this in MC Morgan’s Web Logs and Wikis: New Writing Spaces for Advancing Writers at Bemidji State University, which I think is in Minnesota. There are lots of Norwegians there, aren’t there? Anyway: the assignments are great. Instead of being presented with a blog already set up, or struggling with the horrors of installing MoveableType, students are simply asked to set up a weblog and announce it to the class weblog. They decide for themselves which system to use, though blogger.com is recommended for this first blog. The course also uses wikis, and I’ve been thinking about that too - after all, I don’t actually want to teach blogging for the sake of blogging (though it probably sounds that way sometimes), I want to teach digital culture and digital communication. That includes a basic literacy in how to write, link and communicate on the web.

In Morgan’s personal weblog I found a wonderful comment on student essays which I think I’ll show my students, because it’s just what I’ve been struggling to tell them recently:

[teaching critical blogging]

Adrian emphasises process- and problem-based teaching, and his weblog has lots of notes about his teaching. Yesterday he wrote about the stages between a student asking “What’s the difference between a blog and a webpage” and the class finding information and assessing its validity. (Btw, you get the best results by typing that question into Google, which none of the students did. Jon writes that he wouldn’t have thought of that either, actually, and he’s certainly net literate…)

As a new teacher I find this kind of very concrete example of how process-based teaching can work really useful. It also reminds me (yet again) that so much of what I take for granted is utterly cryptic to students. For instance, in his description of the discussion on how to figure out whether Rebecca Blood’s essay on the history of weblogs is an authoritative source, Adrian not only lists many ways of working out that it is indeed authoritative, he also demonstrates that what is blindingly obvious to someone whose net literate is impossible to see for most people.

Next week’s topic in my web design class is usability. Some of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns are on the curriculum, and we’re going to do our own usability testing of some websites, and don’t worry, the week after we’ll discuss alternatives to usability. But I think I’ll start by asking the students to figure out what usability actually is.

You see, my students are all blogging, but they’re mostly not blogging very critically. They use their blogs as learning logs, which is good, and they write about what we’ve done in class and how they’ve read X or tried that, and what they’re trying to do with the design of their blogs and what their project group’s planning and so on. They link to each others blogs too, which is excellent, and many of them have clearly established their blogs as their own spaces.

So this is all good, but I also want them to blog critically. To link to relevant articles and websites and write about them and consider them and connect them and so on. For instance, they rarely link to more than one external site in one entry, which I’m realising is actually quite an important function of good blogging: it connects separate things with a personal perspective. It’s hard to work out quite how to teach independent, critical thought. To my great surprise I’ve discovered that giving a 2 x 45 minute lecture is way easier than setting up tasks and discussions and problems that actually help the students develop their own skills. I don’t believe in lectures, though. I know some of my students do.

I’ve got some students who just aren’t comfortable blogging, too. Some of them haven’t actually written anything for weeks, though they’re active in their project groups. They need to write more in order to fulfill the requirements to pass the course. Hm. Studentene skal lykkes, “Students shall succeed", is the law writ in the Quality Reform of Norwegian tertiary education (strictly speaking not valid till next semester, but still). It’s a drastic leap from the rather medieval traditions of Norwegian universities up till now, where students who failed were just not good enough. Bad luck. You probably shouldn’t have gone to university in the first place, was the unspoken refrain. I prefer the new credos, though I guess it’s hard to figure out: do the non-bloggers not blog because they’re lazy or because they need help, somehow? How can I help them to succeed? More intensity, varied teaching methods and more feedback, the Stortingsmelding says (point 5.3.4). And use computers. Well, I’ve got the computers, anyway.

I guess I should ask the students. Oh, and as always, comments are welcome from all.

[update: Mark reminds us that even “authoritative” websites can be wrong or controversial, and Rebecca Blood responds to the criticism of the article being inaccurate on another blog. Personally, I love Rebecca’s article, and her book, too: Rebecca emphasises exactly the aspects of blogging that I think are essential to it, and she’s been one of the people who’s most clearly seen and expressed that weblogs are the Web’s first native genre. The main point of the essay, to me, isn’t exactly who did what when (I guess I don’t really care that much about that) but the flow and ideas of it all.]