Work @ TAFE

With workshops, skype calls, content-restructure, new content creation and some marketing thrown in on the side, it’s been a busy two weeks!

Evaluating the Blogging in Education resource

I’ve had two opportunities over the past few weeks to run Getting Started with Blogging in Education as a face-to-face activity within TAFE, and it’s been great fun! Although this work isn’t actually part of the resource development, it’s provided an excellent opportunity to see how the resource works in practise. I’ve started recording ideas about running the workshop on a new page, Blogshop Facilitator Tips, to help anyone who wants to facilitate a similar workshop (although it’s far from finished).

Overall, it’s been great fun running the workshops - people are always amazed at how easy it is to publish on the Internet themselves - and we’ll hopefully be running follow-up workshops! The structure of the Getting Started workshop has been great too, getting people to investigate blogging in groups themselves, rather than just being told what blogging is about. Unfortunately we’ve been running out of time to investigate educational blogging thoroughly, but we’ve been able to discuss lots of ideas for classroom use (communication, contributions, etc.)

One aspect of the workshop that needs refining is the example blog that participants create - this needs to be something useful that they can continue to use after the workshop. I don’t think it’s feasible to create something in the workshop and feel confident to go ahead and use it in class. Instead, maybe we could create a professional development journal - participants could use it to learn in their own professional area, linking and constructing new information as they find it… we could even practise doing this as part of the workshop. I feel that people need to practise blogging first to appreciate the incredible learning implications before thinking about using blogs in class?

Restructuring the Collaborative Resource

I’ve been revising the structure of the main page a little, but after a Skype call with Leigh Blackall - another contributor - we’ve decided to broaden the original scope of the resource to better fit the title of Blended Learning. Leigh’s currently working on the restructure to include other aspects of Blended Learning.

Marketing - or raising awareness

In an attempt to interest others in contributing to this resource (currently there’s only three of us who have contributed anything), I’ve started commenting on relevant educational blogs with a link to the resource. It would be unreal if other people who also saw a need for such collaborative resources were keen to contribute and add their bit! Or even just saw the benefit of using the Getting Started Blogshop! The more interest we can generate, the more successful the resource will be.

We have rated as a link on the Wikispaces hompage (without putting it there ourselves! Viewed 1st June 05), but need would like to invite more participation by creating a structure for something that people want to contribute to (ie. people need to see the benefit).

Related to this, we need to create an About BlendedLearning page, describing the purpose of the site and the main contributers (people and organisations - anyone else who contributes can add themselves too). This is often something that helps people decide whether they want to contribute or not.

Other related news

After having considered using Drupal as the technology behind this colaborative development (see Weekly report 4), I came across a Drupal-based resource called Weblogs for Educators that is very similar in purpose to our Getting Started with Blogging in Education workshop - a collaboratively-developed resource to help educators get started using Weblogs. It seems that our thoughts about Drupal being inaccessible to most potential contributors might be right - I could only find one contributor to the resource. I’ve added a comment asking for some feedback on their experience but haven’t had a reply yet.

Aims for the coming week:

• Finish Blogshop Facilitator Tips
• Create and work on an About BlendedLearning page.
• Continue re-organising to invite more participation
• Continue trying to raise awareness of the resource