e-learning 2.0

We have now had two weeks using blogs on two of the modules I teach.

I am using blogs in two ways:

• on my third year undergraduate module I have set up a module blog on which I post and the students comment. Most of the comments are in response to activities or are giving feedback about the student’s experience. Given these constraints the blog seems to be working well however I wouldhave preferred a system where all the students have their own blog. At the moment this quite a job to set up as we do not have our own blog server at the university. There is also a wiki on this module which is used by groups of students to put together their ideas in response to a set of questions:

• what are the basic web design principles and how do we put them into practice?
• what is “Extensible HyperText Markup Language” (XHTML), how and why should we use it?
• how can we style web pages using cascading style sheets (CSS) and what are the reasons for doing so?
• how can we set up web pages using “extensible markup language” (XML) and should we bother?
• how can we use “Extensible Stylesheet Language” (XSL) to style web pages and what advantages and disadvantages does it have?
• what are the advantages and disadvantages of separating design from content?

On my master’s module each of the students has a blog and they also cooperate as a group on a wiki. They have to use their blogs to provide evidence that they have satisfied the learning outcomes of the module. Their claim for a grade will initially be developed on the wiki and then transfered to their own web pages. Criteria for the grades will be developed by the students in discussion with me, on the wiki, and will provide a basis for the grade claim. At the moment the blogs seem to be working well and I have had some excellent feedback from students. This may be partly because they do not have the opportunity to see one another between sessions, unlike the undergraduate students. At the students requerst we are experimenting with an online week for session 3 (Feb 14 -16). I look forward to seeing how this goes when the only communication is via web pages, blogs, the wiki and email.

I have written a second year module, which will be available next year which is about web publishing in its broader sense and will use blogs and wikis as an integral part of the module and the student’s reflections on their use will form part of the subject matter. I am hoping that the inclusion of the use of blogs and wikis as part of the learning outcomes and assessments will help to make the blogs a more dynamic force in the student’s learning.