(a very brief summary of the paper delivered at
Blogtalk Downunder, 21 May 2005)
The authors describe the teaching of Chinese language in a secondary school, using weblogs to implement a portfolio-building environment. The main aims were to encourage students to:
- engage in reflective practice
- read, share and comment through their reflections
- keep track of and take responsibility for their own development and
learning
Students were required to set up their own blogs. The authors also relate some problems, and some student comments .
Full paper: TAN Yuh-Huann, TEO Eng-Hui, AW Wai-Lin Alice, LIM Wei-Ying -
Portfolio Building in Chinese Language Learning Using Blogs(a very brief summary of the paper delivered at
Blogtalk Downunder, 21 May 2005)
The authors use weblogs in a university class in Business Management. Each group of 7 to 10 students ran its own blog.
Students were expected to choose one of the 23 case studies provided, and post a critique of it onto the group blog (worth 60% of their mark). They then had to post comments on the critiques by two peers (worth 20% of their mark for each comment).
The paper includes some illuminating student feedback about their experience of the process.
Full paper: Carol Cooper & Lyn Boddington -
Assessment by blog: Ethical case studies assessment for an undergraduate business management class(a very brief summary of the paper delivered at
Blogtalk Downunder, 21 May 2005)
The author uses weblogs in a final year university class in Design and Technology.
He explains why weblogs were chosen as a suitable online environment for student activity.
His observations relate to the development of approaches to using weblogs in learning and teaching.
Full paper: Gavin Sade - Paper -
Weblogs as Open Constructive Learning Environments(a brief summary of the paper delivered at
Blogtalk Downunder, 21 May 2005)
"Granularity" refers to the scale of detail of parts within a larger item.
Granularity has allowed blogs to be woven by the network. A blog consists of multiple posts but also multiple links in and out. These links point to parts, not wholes (individual entries, not entire sites) and it is the presence and density of these links that are fundamental to blogs as emergent systems
The situation until now:For example,
the Web can be considered highly granular because it is made up of many millions of individual parts, each of which appears well suited to being interconnected in quite unstructured ways.
A book, on the other hand, is more monolithic, less granular (the pages are usually designed to be used in a fixed order, and to reference an individual page or paragraph you need to refer also to other parts of the book (e.g. the title page, publisher info)
A
video is not really granular. You can link to the whole video (including credits etc.) or not at all. For a web page to quote a single phrase spoken in a video, it is currently necessary to download the entire video, then find and play the phrase.
The author suggests
ways to make video more granular and thus more finely quotable on the Web in general, and specifically in blogs.
Full paper: Adrian Miles -
Media Rich versus Rich Media (or why video in a blog is not the same as a video blog)
