Blogging Goes to College: Brainstorming Weblog Use in Higher Education

An instance of Academic Blogging

2006-08-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

Of interest: The Blog That Ate a Presidency, posted this morning on Inside Higher Ed.com concerning Alfred State College, part of the SUNY system.

Students and Blogging

2006-07-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

One thing we did not consider at our workshop last week was the conundrum of students not liking to blog or not utilizing the technology. With so many students using social software such as MySpace and Facebook, not to mention having their own blogs with Xanga, I did not think about students actually not wanting to use the blogging technology.

A post today on The Wired Campus, Blogging in the Dark, discusses an article in the Shanghai Daily concerning students who "simply ignore" classroom blogs. Wired Campus blog author , Brock Read, poses the following:

"So here is a pair of questions that could easily be extended to professors who blog: What flaws can keep a classroom blog from getting off the ground? And once students begin to lose interest in a blog, how can it be reanimated?"

What does anyone think? In our zeal to incorporate blogs into academics and libraries, did we overlook the obvious?

Keep it going.

2006-07-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Laura for the rapid summary. I'd appreciate any comments or corrections that you all have to Laura's summaries. I'd like to point others to the blog so that the benefits can be shared.

Paul

Session underway

2006-07-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

We began the session at 10am with refreshments and of course a nice wireless connection. There are about 30 people here from various libraries all over the state and from all different age groups and areas of librarianship.

Right now we are going around the room introducing ourselves and talking about our favorite Web 2.0 things. There's a variety of experience with these applications and it should provide some great discussion. We'll be discussing teaching & learning, library applications, other uses, implementation issues, and policy issues. Hopefully I or someone else will blog about the conversation(s) later.

Quality Indicators: Feed Buttons vs. Linking

2006-07-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

There has been some discussion about the popularity Blogs being reliant upon the RSS feed buttons.

A site's popularity also depends on the number of other blogs linking to a specific blog which are then used to rank search results in tools like Technorati and Ice Rocket. When a site ranks high in these search tools the more apt a posting will be found and read, regardless if the reader subscribes.

In some ways it is nice to know that 50 people link to my personal blog using various RSS feeds, but the number of posts/sites linking to my blog is a better quality indicator.

The difference is similar to knowing how many times one of my journal articles is read vs. the number of other authors who cite my work. The later is the more important quality indicator from a scholarly perspective.

Note time of meeting

2006-07-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

Candi Clevenger is sending out an e-mail to this effect but just to use the lines of communication open to us please note:

Our meeting on Thursday will start at 10:00 AM and go to 3:00PM. Some of us need the extra drive time and time to get slowed down by road construction / resurfacing.

Paul

Blogs & RSS, A study

2006-07-21T05:14:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, Rebecca mentioned the necessity of using RSS feed in conjunction with blogs and made a valid point concerning the popularity of blogs being, in part, reliant on those little orange feed buttons. This morning Walt Crawford, in his blog Walt at Random, posted about a recent Pew(Research) study on blogging that dealt with bloggers using RSS. Check out his post, Pew & RSS.

If this is of interest to you, here are a few other Pew reports:

Blogs & RSS

2006-06-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling to organize my thoughts into something to write for this blog for a while now. I finally figured out what I wanted to post about when I was looking at my feeds today and saw the answer staring me in the face... RSS.

Quite frankly, blogs would not be as popular without the little orange feed buttons that make it so easy to bring this information into our daily lives in a place or using a tool that we already utilize. Overall, people do not read blogs by navigating to that page or simply bookmarking them; they use an aggregator. Unless a feed is in their aggregator, it just doesn't get read. So I think that any discussion about blogs has to also include RSS as a major factor.

But RSS can be used for a lot of other information that falls outside of the "blog" label (e.g. Table of Contents; podcasts; new books lists) so what is a blog? Does a blog have to have RSS in order to be a "blog"? Does it have to have comments? There are many uses for RSS in academia from current awareness to announcements (see above examples), but would we classify these feeds as blogs? I wonder if maybe the blogs are not the important technological wonder that needs the most brainstorming, but rather RSS which has much more versatile uses and is the fuel propelling the blog explosion. These are just a few questions and ponderings that I thought may be useful for the 27th. Your thoughts?

For a good post about the future of RSS and its aggregators look at Tech Crunch.

In search of other blogs

2006-06-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

I am currently working on an area of our library web site geared specifically to our managerial staff... what they need to know, additional links if they want to delve deeper into the field, etc.

I would like to add information to each page that includes ListServs and Blogs about librarianship. The information doesn't have to be specific to librarianship in Ohio, but it would be nice if I could find a few that are state-specific. I would like to divide them by area of expertise if at all possible... general issues in librarianship, circulation, reference, cataloging, ILL, etc.

Are there any good ListServs and Blogs that you could recommend? I'm hitting the consortium sites to see if anyone has anything good listed, but wondered if any of you had stumbled on something really great out there that I might not otherwise find.

Any suggestions?

blog post frequency

2006-06-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here's another interesting read: Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore by Eric Kintz (and mentioned here today). Kintz lists ten reasons why posting every day might actually be a bad thing. It's interesting to think about his points in a library context. Here are a few that might be particularly relevant for us:

#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0

#4 - Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere

Three Stars and a Chili Pepper

2006-06-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to alert you all to another good reading, this one by Joseph Ugeretz, a Prof. of English and Director of TTL at Manhattan CC (CUNY). It is entitled Three Stars and a Chili Pepper: Social Software, Folksonomy and User Reviews in a Coillege Context. It is at:
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/Ugoretz-social-software-folksonomy

Technorati, Blogs in Schools, and Superintendents

2006-06-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

How familiar is anyone with using Technorati? I know a little bit about it and have heard the term bandied about with regularity. To learn more, I checked out the Technorati: About Us page and the thing that struck me was their comment: "Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs." I did a blog search for blog and reached an error page stating we weren't claimed and presented with a small box with html tags to place in our blog. As a librarian, 'tagging' my blog appeals to me in an organizational kind of way. Anyone utilizing this tool?

An article on Webblogg-ed was posted last week titled Getting Serious about Blogs in Schools caught my attention, especially when it detailed how much students have changed in this digital age and how we, as educators, need to be able to keep up. Of additional interest was the link to a post by Chris Lehmann, currently the Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Lehmann's post, Talking to 49 Superintendents, is a great piece which begins with the attention grabbing line "Tell them that our schools have to change or die." While neither of these blog articles are higher education specific, they are of interest because we are in many ways dealing with the same, continuing student body; freshman not far removed from high school.

New Reading

2006-06-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

Check out Walt Crawford's newest piece "Books, Blogs and Style" at

http://cites.boisestate.edu/v6i7a.htm

Paul

Blogs are user-friendly

2006-06-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

Blogs are a very effective way of engaging students, particularly in online classes. Blogs not only gives the students the opportunity to participate in class discussion, but they also avoid the exchange of countless e-mails that clutter mailboxes and very often go unchecked or unanswered.

Fortunately, for teachers and students, bloggging is easy to do. A blogger needs only minimal technical knowledge and blogs are friendly enough even for the techno phobic student in the class.

A colleague is currently taking an online religion class that is making use of a blog for class discussion. She is very happy with how the blog is working out. Her class blog has given students an opportunity to participate where they might not otherwise have done so. It has also been effective for collaboration and discussion.

Another nice feature of blogs is the fact that it’s often the perfect place to add a “little something” to the discussion.

Has anyone had or heard of any negative experiences using a blog as a teaching tool?

Blogging and Scholarly Communications

2006-06-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Instead of reiterating what I have already posted , please visit my views about faculty blogging at The Medium is the Message: Is Blogging Scholarly Communication?

Just testing

2006-05-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! I'm just testing to make sure I've done this right.

Questions of Policy

2006-05-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks Candi and Paul for opening this blog to posts from workshop attendees. This is a great collaborative endeavor.

I was very interested to see Paul mention part of our discussion would include the issue of blog policy. I agree that policy and guidelines are necessary, but wonder if too much policy negates what we are trying to accomplish with blogging as a whole. I do not mean common sense blog policy (do not blog anything you wouldn't want your grandmother to see) verses blogging that can get you fired, but guidelines that will be established before the blog is open to the public, students, faculty, and the blogosphere. Do we spend so much time developing the policy that the blog never comes to fruition?

I am also curious as to how people who are blogging in libraries now are answering to those who just don't "get" blogging and what the buzz is about. Are you able to convince others to participate? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time explaining what it is you want to accomplish with blogging.

Open posting to "Blogging goes to college"

2006-05-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

Candi will open up this blog for any workshop member to post as soon as she gets time to set you all up.

Paul

Sharing via del.icio.us

2006-05-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Rich James asked for a way to share resources via http://del.icio.us so, I have unilaterally identified a tag "ohiolinkblog2006" . To share via del.icio.us , just tag a site with that characterset. To receive sites, just subscribe to that tag ... which is probably akin to my telling ya'll how to drink water.

Paul

A few words from your facilitator

2006-05-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Greetings!

I'm Paul Kobulnicky, the Director of Maag (rhymes with "dog") Library at YSU and I'll be facilitating the brainstorming session at OhioLINK. I want to welcome participants and tell you that I think we can have a lot of fun and do some good work at the same time. If you need to e-mail me, I am

As you may have surmised, the purpose of the session is to generate a list of possible uses of weblog software in a higher education setting, discuss issues of use and policy that may pertain and then to disseminate our results to the broader community. Along the way we form some personal relationships and get some face time.

Just so you can see that we are not alone, I saw this, this morning (5/19/06)

***********************

Blog.ac.uk: UK's first educational blogging conference
Submitted by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on Thu, 2006/05/18 - 10:05am.
Momentum is building for the UK's first educational blogging conference in June 2006. Blog.ac.uk, coordinated by Josie Fraser, will look at all aspects of blogging in (and for) education, across all sectors, as well as current / future developments in Web 2.0 technologies. Guest speakers will include Barbra Ganley and Stephen Downes. The conference is aimed broadly at "advanced practitioners", and will function in part as a networking and professional development opportunity for active bloggers in the UK education community. The conference website is a work in progress, so please check back for details and (eventually) conference outputs and resources.

The event is not truly "public", however - it's limited to 50 attendees, for various practical reasons, and there is apparently already a "substantial" waiting list. Read Josie's explanation for the restricted numbers on her blog.

********************

Sounds like us, eh?

I also wanted to point everyone to the following resource (7 things You Should Know About Blogs ... from EDUCAUSE) :

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7006

If you search the Educause website under "Weblogs" there are many other readings that are germain to our discussion. If you have good readings, please feel free to post them.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Welcome

2006-05-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Blogging Goes to College, a place for the creative, hip and blog-savvy to discuss new ways and ideas of enhancing the use of blogs as education tools.