Today I'm in Leeds where I'm one of the speakers at the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) event Beyond Email: Strategies for Collaborative Working and Learning in the 21st Century. I'm here with Brian Kelly, one of my colleagues from UKOLN, which is also based at the University of Bath. Brian holds the UK Web Focus post which is funded by the JISC and the MLA.
UCISA “represents the whole of higher education, and increasingly further education, in the provision and development of academic, management and administrative information systems, providing a network of contacts and a powerful lobbying voice.”
I'll report back on the rest of the event later in the week but the main purpose of this Auricle article is to provide access to my slides and notes for the event.
The title of my talk is Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?, with a bias probably more towards the latter than the former.
As we'll see, however, there are some potential gotchas! for the institution who finds blogs have caught them unawares.
There are also some potential gotchas! for the blogging enthusiast who finds themselves at odds with institutions, or representatives thereof, who take a less than supportive view of this form of publishing.
I have a roadmap for my presentation, but in this article I'm providing many more slides than I will ever be able to talk to in the time I've been allocated; nevertheless, hopefully, they'll prove useful to both the event delegates as well Auricle readers. I openly admit that I'm standing on the shoulders of some of the giants of blogging for this presentation and so I liberally cite their work throughout.
In summary, my presentation attempts to show that weblogs are already being used extensively within education and that their use should be welcomed and embraced. Some users of weblogs are, in effect, using weblogs as learning environments in their own right. While there is still some debate about the level of interactivity inherent in the weblog model, there appears to be less argument that such 'micro-publishing' for an audience (who may, or may not, comment) is consonant with some of the goals of higher education, which are to develop the skills of analysis, argument, and discourse. What is clear from the examples shown and the experience of established 'bloggers' is that it is the sense of ownership of the story/article/item (then offered for public/community reading/review) which differentiates the blog from other, more transitory, forms of electronic communication. I tend to support the argument put forward by others in the e-learning world that, ironically, effective blogging arises when the putative blogger learns to read and listen to the arguments and information being put forward by others; then, and only then, does it become possible to contribute in a non trivial way to the community of 'listeners'.
Even a cursory trawl around the Web will uncover examples of how institutions, companies and organisations, yes, even universities, have been unprepared when they are faced with the reality of such 'bottom up' publishing reaching out to specialist communities or even, shudder, the general public:)
Higher Education, as a global concept, puts itself forward as an incubator of free speech, ideas, debate and discourse. Of course, one person's free speech can, oh so quickly, be construed as an unwarranted attack on others or, alternatively, the undermining of the status quo. The challenge here, particularly, for the HE and broader tertiary educational community, is to support the right of academia, in all its forms, to publish, what may very well be, unpopular or divergent views expressed in vehicles like weblogs, whilst at the same time differentiating those from postings which are blatantly '…ist' in their intention. It's going to be difficult but we need to find a way forward and, again, we can be 'carried on the shoulders of the giants' who have gone before us. Reasonable, innovation-supportive Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) are one way forward and there's some good examples out there.
Below, are my annotated Powerpoint slides (in PDF format) in the order of presentation. I'm providing them in print resolution but sectioned to minimize download times. If you want a quick overview either jump to the screen resolution handout PDFs and HTML variant at the bottom of this article.
Session roadmap (435 KB)
This just provides a graphic of my order of battle:)
Blogs: A brief history (325 KB)
A quick look at the origins of, and key events in blog history. And they are older than you think!
What's a blog? (228 KB)
So what exactly is a weblog anyway? We can define blogs from a structural, functional, or even philosophical point of view.
Types of blog (221 KB)
A brief consideration of the key types of blogs with some representative examples.
Blog & Syndication Statistics (217 KB)
So where can we get the metrics? Despite the absence of one single definitive source of data the apparent growth rate of blogs is still pretty astounding.
Blog Affordances (242 KB)
Now we get down to heart of the presentation. What can blogs contribute? They can contribute a lot, but two features stand out. First, they are by far the easiest means of publishing to a dynamic Web site. Second, they are in effect an authoring front end to syndicated feeds like RSS and Atom. In turn, syndication technologies can make a major contribution to the creation and support of distributed learning systems. I provide some example of such syndication in practice and ask everyone to reflect on the potential for themselves or their institutions.
Contexts of Use (2.93 MB)
So how are blogs actually being used in education? The simple answer, of course, is limited only by the imagination of the blog authors and the support offered by their host institutions. Included in my examples are: the blog as an important personal knowledge management tool; supporting the development of critical analysis skills; and building interdisciplinary bridges, with Harvard showing us one way forward here. We've got blogs supporting courses and becoming de facto VLEs; we've got blogs supporting informal continuing professional development; we've got blogs being used for 'citizen' reporting purposes. Some institutions, have even taken a leaf out of the commercial hosting companies like Blogger.com and now offer their communities a 'no brainer' facility for setting up their own personal blog, e.g. the UK's University of Warwick.
Finding Quality Blogs (213 KB)
So where can you find 'good' blogs that interest you? There's certainly no shortage of blogs but, for the moment, the solution appears to lie within the blogging community itself with some community members becoming trusted aggregators/annotators and providing the online tools to make it easy to register a blog. Of course, there are attempts to have 'official' aggregations, plus the commercial world has obviously been looking at what's already out there and as a result are beginning to offer some pretty polished tools and services … which, unfortunately, has some less positive implications.
Some Constraints & Issues (586 KB)
We've been pretty upbeat so far, but here we turn over some stones and enter the discomfort zone. There are certainly some technical constraints and issues but all of those can be overcome with goodwill and some knowledge/effort. In the main, blogs are dead easy to install and use when you are functioning at the individual or small group level. Many certainly offer multi-author multi-weblog capabilities, but you need to read the small print! Multi-author and multi-blog may be supported but the process may be manual, which just won't scale if you want all user accounts in your institution to be given a blog. So choose your blog engine with care … fortunately there are some open source solutions around which, apparently, can scale, e.g. LiveJournal. However, most of the constraints and issues related to weblogs are not technical at all, they are policy related. Weblogs, and the syndication which most natively support, can either be viewed as either transformational or disruptive technologies. Problems tend to arise where institutions view them as the latter, i.e. 'the bosses don't like blogs'. Problems arise, also, when blogs are perceived as endowed with almost mystical powers to transform the learning process. Failure, inevitably awaits those institutions who do no more than provide the technology but provide no guidance and state no expectations. Alternatively, those instituitons who adopt a 'use this blog or else' stance, linked directly to assessment, are likely to only engender inputs that the students feel they 'have' to do. To this pot pouri of things to consider we can add avoiding blog spam, moving beyond the trivial input, and considerations of digital rights. The last of these is particularly important in the blogging world, which is based on the ethos of sharing. Sharing, however, does not mean 'ripping off' … sorry, I meant plagiarism. Fortunately, Creative Commons licensing has a lot to offer here, particularly 'Attribution Share Alike' licensing..
Policies? (1.62 MB)
This section is really an extension of the last. Serious problems arise when policies are reactive because they are, therefore, invariably, perceived as repressive. We look at some of the situations which have arisen when 'differences of opinion' arise between blog authors and their host institutions/organisations. There are also some examples of how spurious complaints about blog authors work can result in the complainants getting their fingers very badly burned.
Blog Futures? (2.63 MB)
The humble blog just seems to go on and on. In one relatively recent incarnation it appears to act like a digital 'filling station' for media devices. The commercial world is also beginning to cast an eye in the direction of blogs, either as a source of business intelligence, or viewing key bloggers in an area as 'thought leaders' which will pull a readership to articles syndicated on leading sites such as Yahoo!
Links and Resources (227 KB)
Finally, as if there has not been sufficient to read and digest I leave you with a lot more.
If you want all the slides at once I'm also offering the complete slides from presentation (4.81 MB), again in PDF format, but this time encoded at screen resolution to keep the file size small. Here, also, is all the slides in handout format (546 KB) again in screen resolution (2 slides per page).
Finally, here's the basic HTML version of the presentation. As usual, despite several attempts by me, Powerpoint doesn't quite manage to pull off HTML export that is a perfect representation of the presentation, but it's probably good enough. Nevertheless, maybe I should start looking for another, more Web friendly, interoperable presentation tool similar the quality offered by Mozilla Firefox? 🙂
