Entries in "General Discussion"

WebLogs II

First of all, I'm going to copy this here: this is a much more appropriate posting for the general discussion category (rather than for the EECS 340 category):

I am interested in seeing how to use blogs for teaching and know you are using this for your class. But if I were a student in your class, what would I get from seeing this entry under "Reading"? The phrase "Lecture 7" does not seem to convey any information. Am I missing something? Or is it that actual students in your class have other information that makes this meaningful to them?

Thanks,

Mano

Thanks for your comments, Mano. An old-fashioned professor (such as myself) would just use a WebLog as a log on the Web. In that respect, my Blog (under the EECS 340 category) is just a continuation of the announcement blog that I used to have in previous semesters.

In practice, this means that the students have access to the course Web page, where they have much more material posted, and then if they click on "Announcements", they will be brought to the Blog sub-site on EECS 340. This for example allows me to effectively create multiple parallel blogs, one for each course and for each research project. In summary, the Blog is a continuation of what used to happen anyway in the previous Web page by other means. The student would get out of this a continuosly updated syllabus of the course before each lecture.

Is this worth the effort? Could you do this with Blackboard or just with plain html as I used to do before? Probably. I suppose the jury is still out, but I think I'm going to give it a try for this semester. Perhaps, the biggest thing that I got here is that I should mark the EECS 340 track as not being open for discussion.

Are there other potential uses for blogs in education? You bet, but I haven't thought a whole lot about it, and probably I'd like to take it slow.

Is this an appropriate use of blogs? Aren't blogs supposed to be used for discussion? A Blog is a log on the Web and so this is entirely appropriate. As I was mentioning in my previous posting, I am already maintaining a number of publicly accessible activity logs (for a variety of very good reasons), so this is probably going to be helpful independently. Finally, this is my blog, and I'm going to use it as I want! :-)

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WebLogs

First, I'm going to copy the comments down here, mostly because it belongs to the general discussion category:

Professor:

I saw your comment over at http://blog.case.edu/mxs24/2005/01/26/my_own_blog about how you are trying to use your blog to supplement your teachings. I think it is great!

I just wanted to let you know... it kind of... well... it kind of sucks right now. We're working on ways that any course that wants it could set up a blog. And, once we do that, we can set up ways to facilitate handing out course material and distributing course information. And, I hope, it will be awesome.

But, we're working on that. Right now, we're in Beta; and we're trying to convince management blogs are a good thing to have and a good thing to spend money on; so the more you blog -- the better.

On a related note, I used to be a CompE. student; and I would be interested in hearing what all of this "supplemental lectures" and "reading materials" are. If, maybe, in your posts, you could provide some more information for use former students and prospective students and randomly interested parties... well, we would just eat it up.


Cool!

Last year, I started keeping an announcement log on the Web page of EECS 340 and when I saw the Case Blog, I migrated it. The 340 Blog is still much related to the course Web page (which is only one click away: click on "Announcements"). That's why Blog readers would know where the supplemental lectures are: they are posted on the main Web site, and refer to Dave Mount's lecture notes.

Perhaps the biggest potential of Blogs is for research. I think I read somewhere that this is actually how Blog started: lab researchers would keep their lab journal electronically, and at some point decided to post it on the Web. Here are a couple of examples of research blogs I'm involved in:


Ahmad's log is significant in a couple of respects. First, some of our research is (sort of) proprietary, so only few people should access it. Second, it is really important for us to be able to post figures, charts, diagrams on the log. Another thing is that there are many WebLogs, and it is nice to differentiate among them by category - basically, creating multiple virtual logs. In fact, there is at least two or three other WebLogs that are important to me (and that are password protected).

With all of this, you can see that I am an old-fashioned professor: for me, a WebLog is mostly an activity Log on the Web.

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