Because of the way the web tends to work, often with homogeneous groups clustering around concepts and perspectives they already love, I suspect that most of the people who read the DML Research Hub tweet, above, nodded knowingly before they retweeted it or moved on to the next one in their feed. But if you stop to think about it, "Learning is an intensely personal, messy journey" is not the way a lot of people think about learning or education.
Until a few years ago, I certainly didn't think of it that way. There was nothing personal or student-centered about a perfect score on a standardized test. And messiness, uncertainty, vulnerability, struggle - those were all indications of a lack of professionalism or preparation, depending on the context. My discomfort with the personal, messy nature of learning has played itself out in my relationship with my own blog. Out of necessity, my blog is a place for me to struggle and experiment. But just because vulnerability is necessary for learning doesn't mean I've always worn my struggles like honor ribbons. As a student and occasional teacher I find myself confronting my habits of instruction-centeredness all the time. I have to remind myself that it's acceptable to struggle publicly while learning; to value process knowledge, reflective practice, and meta analysis over content acquisition; to concentrate on projects that suit my interests; and to question and occasionally challenge my doctoral program requirements and cultural expectations. I'm fighting to transform my own assumptions about learning--a paradigm of depersonalized, compartmentalized learning--all the time.
As I struggle to adopt a kinder, more holistic, inclusive, flexible, and joyful framework for education (my own and others), I find Connected Learning to be an ongoing source of inspiration. I am very excited to participate in #ConnectedCourses because I need as much exposure to the concepts as I can get; exposure leads to confrontation of current beliefs, and ultimately transformation. That, plus the people leading the sessions write some pretty interesting stuff :)
This is an introductory post for the connected course taking place at connectedcourses.net.
My name is Paul-Olivier Dehaye, I am a research mathematician in Zurich. I have taught for close to 15 years at university level, and two years ago started investing time in online education. Last year I taught a Programming in python SPOC and Teaching goes massive: New skills required on Coursera, as well as supervising several edtech projects with students. I am rerunning the python SPOC in the Fall 2014.
This course seems to match my interests very closely, and I am looking forward to relating the themes explored in the course with my own experiences in higher education. I am hoping to learn a lot, contribute positively to the discussion, and maybe get some peer feedback. Of particular resonance to me are issues of silos, faculty autonomy and independence, vulnerability (of students and instructor), censorship, data privacy, ethics and co-discovery (in addition to co-learning).
I am also interested in the community of this course itself: are there marked differences between STEM and other fields? How to make STEM higher ed professors at research institutions understand the importance of those issues? How to communicate that bad decisions now could significantly affect the future of their profession?
I am not entirely sure of how sustained my effort in the course will be, but will do my best!
There is no shortage of web sites, books, articles with tips on how to write blog posts. Many are wrapped in goals of branding and growing readership. We are more interested in seeing you write reflectively about your learning. Listen to ds106 students discuss what their blog means to them, and how they relate it in a personal manner.
When I teach, my absolute rule for students is that there are no absolute rules to blogging. It is an ongoing practice, the process of writing over and aver again will lead you hone a style, tone, and voice that are yours. After all, you are writing in a space you own and manage. Do not feel like you have to try to sound scholarly.
So just write. And publish. And review. Much of the advice will talk about considering your audience, but for the kind of writing we do in connected courses, IMHO, you are really writing for yourself. Cory Doctorow framed it well long ago (in 2002) in My Blog, My Outboard Brain.
What follows you might consider as my own guidelines, from my own 11+ years of outboard braining, reading other blogs, and several years teaching the connected course ds106. For that course in Digital Storytelling, we developed some specifications aimed to help students learn to write up their assignments as blog posts, How To Write Up Assignments Like a Blogging Champ.
Take these as one person’s suggestions, modify, reject, or incorporate in your own practice. This is be no means definitive, so if you are experienced at blogging or teaching others to do it, please add your suggestions below as comments.
I tease my students with a warning, “Don’t Bore Me With Your Blog Post Title!” They get admonished (gently) when they write something with a title such as “Assignment 2”, “Weekly Reflection”, “Audio Project”.
The title is the first thing readers see when they start reading your blog, or when your posts are listed in a sidebar, when you share it in social media, or as listed on a course hub. It’s the headline, the elevator pitch.
You can do many things with titles- from literal and descriptive, to word play, to using allusions to pop culture or history (did you catch the reference to the one for this section?).
Put some thought into the title, or refine it before you publish. In my own writing, I often do not even start until I have what I think is a clever title (often others do not find it clever) (but hey, I am writing for me first!).
What could a web be without links that connect ideas? Hyperlinks are the fundamental unit of connection; use them in your writing.
How, what to link is something you will develop as you write more. But think about it as you write. Consider creating links from your words to relate them to
References, sources of information (papers, other blog posts, the source organizations of something you are writing about)
Important people, places. You may be deeply familiar with Henri Bergson or have visited Opatija but help your reader!
Unusual words or terms that might not be widely understood, imagine if I was discussing my night observations of syzygy without elaboration!
Ideas, phrases that might be connected to, or the work of others. After all, little is truly original. In this way, you almost play with suggesting similarities, or even differences. Links can be playful and exploration inducing.
Try it out. See how others do or do not use links.
In a course where you might be reading and reacting to the writings of other participants, links give credit, and quite often, will automatically notify the author that someone linked to them.
My students new to blogging often write a post as if the reader knows the assignment or question the student is responding to, they will just start writing about “I redid last week’s visual assignment using these photos I took on my phone…”. This is symptomatic of students writing as if the only person reading it is their teacher.
A blog post needs full context; what if it is the only thing someone reads on your blog? Will they know what you are writing about, why? Write a blog post as if it is a standalone entity. Use your hypertext skills to link it the thing you are responding to, or make sure you are writing a clear introduction so a reader knows what you are writing about. Or even for yourself, years later, when the context is less present.
Often when students are asked to publish their work, assignments on a blog, they consider it something like a slot in a door to drop their homework. “Here is my paper…”, “You can watch my video…”, “I snapped a photo of my poster”.
Your blog is a chance to also tell the story behind something you produced. Where did the idea come from? What is the inspiration? What other work does it related to? And how did you create it? Narrate your process— it will help someone who is interested in your work, and will help you later if you try to do something similar later on? For ds106, the focus is not just on creating stories in media, but also telling the story behind the story, like the extras on a DVD.
Writing is not only done with words, in a blog you have ability to embed photos, video, animated GIFs, maps, infographics, sounds. Think of doing this not as just trying to “jazz up” a post, but to communicate visually. Photos are wonderful as metaphors, to introduce topics, to ask your reader to interpret it in context of your writing, or as explanatory information.
A good practical reason to use at least one image in a post is that when it is syndicated into the Connected Courses site, we use the first image as a visual thumbnail on the archive pages. There are numerous places to find creative commons licensed images, but often the easiest route is to take your own photos to represent your idea. It is a great practice in developing your visual communication skills to make your own media (and you do not have to worry about permission!).
My own blog style (the one that developed over time) is that I start almost every blog post with an image. It helps me frame my idea, and to think about the writing before I start writing in how I can represent it in an image. In fact, I will not start writing until I have an opening image. But that’s just what works for me.
Beyond images, we have an entire internet full of media we can use in our blog writing. Why just link to a YouTube video or a TEDTalk when you can insert it directly into your post? By embedding media we can wrap a video, audio, animation with context– rather then sending a reader away from your writing.
WordPress makes embedding media really simple; simply by putting a URL to the place on the web you found it (YouTube or vimeo page, flickr page, etc)– see WordPress embeds as well as the ds106 guide to embedding media.
In the Blogger visual interface, you can add or upload media to embed pretty easy. Tumblr also offers a variety of post types intended to include media in a page.
With almost any blogging platform, you can also manually insert what you might find on media sites as “embed codes”– snippets of HTML that you copy and paste into your blog editor– just note that to have these codes work, you must be using the HTML editor mode of your platform.
The Flip Side of Blogging: Participating in the Blogs of Other People
An import flip side to writing in your own blog, is writing in the spaces of other people’s blogs; that is a key attribute of being a connected learner. One might consider it as a small version of blogging, writing a short response, using links, maybe even media in the comments space of someone else’s blog.
It creates more connections. And nothing, nothing motivates a new blogger more than getting a comment, especially from someone they might not know.
Tumblr gif found on http://giphy.com/gifs/xmQh8NQ78y8QU
When you give feedback in someone’s blog, aim to be constructive. What is a constructive comment? It ought to be more than “Nice work” or “I agree” or “like”. Constructive comments often are a few sentences long, and include useful feedback or ideas for improvement. You can explain why you like what was written or why you agree with it. Or explain why you disagree. Or offer additional resources or links that might benefit the writer. For every bit of opinion offered, think of adding an “and…” statement.
Also, think of it as being a guest in someone else’s house (we have enough vile comments in YouTube and newspaper web sites). One approach to giving criticism is to put it inside a sandwich- open with aspects you praise or agree with, offer critical statements, and close with a positive. Perhaps the best advice is to comment in the style and mood that you would like to receive. For some more advice see:
And when you get comments, reply on your site, if it merits a response. Think of this as a conversation; one side conversations are not interesting, right?
The hard part might be- with all the content happening in Connected Courses, what should you comment on? Some people will be tweeting their posts. You can check the flow of posts on the front page on the site. And if you really want an oracle to help you, just try our magic link to a random syndicated Connected Courses blog post.
How would you go about trying to get your students anyone to understand twitter if you only have an hour to do it? (There is a good “why” for the rush*, but i won’t go into it now). Please help me improve my ideas below
What has not worked at all
In the past, I’ve explained twitter to my adult student-teachers (and also my colleagues at the Center, and faculty at my university) by showing them a visual, a video, and describing stuff, then showing it to them, showing myself doing it, letting them do a couple of small tasks, and posting further resources. Ugh, doesn’t work. I still remember wincing at the way my students conceived of searching for hashtags as if they were googling something. And the way they kept forgetting their twitter usernames (no, really!). I remember how faculty wanted to use twitter to send something to all their class (hello? Thats what those darn LMS’s do well). Also my colleague who got upset when I followed her from our departmental account. Ummm
So I decided the only way to show em how to do it, is to get em to do it. Make it fun. Treasure hunt?
In recent discussions with several of my social media friends, we’ve been talking about how people who are not “connected” don’t really understand what we’re all excited about: they don’t get twitter (most ppl get facebook now, all our parents are on it); they don’t get cMOOCs. One of the reasons, I think, is that you can’t really describe it very well, or describing it does not do it justice.
I was a pretty well-connected person before I ever did a cMOOC, and I totally did not “get it” until I tried it fully in #rhizo14 (I kinda got it in #edcmooc, but was not on facebook or blogging at the time, so incomplete experience). I definitely didn’t get #tvsz til I tried it.
Twitter is just one of those things you don’t get until you use it well. IMHO
So I think next semester, to prepare my students for a twitter game, I will give a twitter orientation via a twitter scavenger hunt (I am not too clear on diff betw this and a treasure hunt btw). The idea is not totally new to me, it’s not mine: a journalism prof here has done it, so I am taking inspiration from her.
So the idea is to get students to do certain tasks, and that those tasks help them improve their twitter literacy.
Some basic tasks that need to be in there are:
1. Create an account (obviously). added later: Andrea Rhen on twitter suggested we discuss use of real name vs pseudonym. This could be an interesting one, particularly that many ppl in Egypt have similar names and might HAVE to get creative. It is also interesting how many ppl use twitter professionally but with fun pseudonyms.
2. Start following some people. Now twitter asks you to do that anyway; I may ask them to follow certain people, have part of the “hunt” be to find certain people
Treasure Hunt ideas
3. I am thinking of asking them to try and get at least 15 followers, or if they’re already on twitter, to get 15 more followers, at the end of a certain time period. Easiest is to follow each other in the class. And yes, I am keeping this on my blog, maybe they’ll find it
4. Take a photo of something (what? not sure; could be a creative thing where they find a spot they like or they photograph something from a weird distance…. oh and maybe others need to guess what it is by replying to the tweet… see next step) on campus, and tweet it with the class hashtag (this requires them having smartphones or tablets, so maybe I can pair them to make sure at least one of them has that option)
5. Respond to another person in class, guessing what their photo is of, or where it was taken or something?
6. If they work in pairs, they can split the “tasks” but need to tag each other on tweets
7. send me a private message on twitter if they have questions about the assignment (this requires that they follow me and I them, but they don’t know that yet)
8. tweet a useful twitter tidbit they find as they’re learning to use it, tweet it with the hashtag #edtech or something…
9. find something useful on twitter (what? Not sure yet) and retweet it
10. find a piece of news that was tweeted at a certain minute of the day (hmmm) and retweet it
11. (I also want them to explore tweetdeck or hootsuite or such but not sure how to approach this)
12. Bonus points to the first three students who respond to tweets I post during the treasure hunt time (could play with these questions so that they also improve twitter literacy maybe)
I still kinda feel like they won’t “get” everything I want them to know about twitter, but it is a start. Just thinking of how much scaffolding they’ll need before the hunt itself. Will prob just ask them to google twitter how-to guides or something and their first tweet would maybe be a link to the how-to guide. I should probably get them to change their ‘egg’ profile pic and write sthg in their profile but I don’t want them rushing it. Maybe the photo they take on campus could be their profile pic. Maybe they do selfies. I don’t know
I also need to figure out how to handle things if some of the students are already on twitter. It would be cool, maybe I could have them do something different, like be mentors for others as well via DM or something.
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As further reading, I may give them this: I was recently reading Howard Rheingold on Twitter in his book Net Smart, then found this great link that summarizes that part of the book, so that’ll be easy to share with my students. It also links to these resources, but since my students are freshmen of diff majors, I do not want to have a journalism focus.
* I want them to play a twitter game in November but I don’t meet them til later in the semester as my module starts the last third of the semester. I can meet them once earlier than our official start date, so i wanna use the class time for this twitter orientation.
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