Kategorie: English

Blogging in educational contexts – My MA Thesis are online available now

von Ralf Appelt 6. Juni 2010 Kommentare3

((Image Source: britbohlinger bei flickr))

Last month I completed my masterthesis and graduated in the international MA Program ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building. You can access all the content online within my thesis (blog) and you can also download the linear pdf file.

Why am I sharing the thesis?

I won’t call it a excellent MA Thesis nor the evaluators did. It is a product which has to fulfill certain formal criteria within a formal learning program. And much more important it needs to be finished one day and there was a specified deadline. In my opinion some theories should be extended and much more connected with the practical suggestions. But I couldn’t invest more time into this work before the date when it has to be submitted. I’d say the text is always beta and a good startingpoint and overview on blogging in educational contexts. ((Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel-sallo/3617083357/))

I used a lot of online resources. That was only possible because people did’nt mind to share they thoughts and findings.
I’d like to share my thoughts and findings too. I don’t like to keep it just on my computer because it is not the perfect work. May be you have additions on it, just write comments or you can use the references or anything else from my work to enhance yours. You’re welcome!
There is a free registration needed to view the whole work.

Why am I using a blog as container for my thesis?

Of course one reason is that the topic of my work deals with blogging and that blogs could be used as LCMS, so why do not use a blog system to publish the work. Another aspect is that the permalinks, trackbacks and comment features might help you to have an easier way to give feedback or hyperlink and reference specific parts online directly. One more reason is that e.g. the tags are additional navigation elements compared to the linear pdf version.

Thanks…

I just hope you can make use of my work. And hey, thanks for sharing!

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Learning Teaching

Web 2.0: Compact Definition

von Ralf Appelt 17. April 2010 Kommentare1

Immer wieder suche ich nach Definitionen. Ich bin sicher auch diese schon einmal verwendet zu haben. Vielleicht kann sie noch mal jemand brauchen!? Hier also die Definition des Web2.0 von Tim O’Reilly himself. Wer es etwas ausführlicher mag liest sich folgenden Artikel durch.
What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences. ((http://radar.oreilly.com/2005/10/web-20-compact-definition.html))

Kategorie: Deutsch English ePedagogy Design Medien & Design

Video about ePortfolios (and PLE’s?)

von Ralf Appelt 9. Oktober 2009 Kommentare0

In Helen Barretts Blog I found this nice video about ePortfolios. It was created by Sònia Guilana.
Helen wrote:

This 3-minute video was created by Sònia Guilana, to explain eportfolios to her high school students (12-18) in Catalonia, Spain. Great images! Nice, simple explanation.

I’m just asking myself if this video could’nt also be used to explain what a ple can offer to learners.

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft Learning Medien & Design

Definition of Blog

von Ralf Appelt 7. Oktober 2009 Kommentare8

I am currently working on a text about Blogs in education. Blogs, that means to me Microblogging like twitter and identi.ca, Tumlelogs/Mesoblogs like tumblr and posterous and “traditional” Weblogs like a WordPress Blog or S9y Blogs.
I would like to have a definition for this group of tools and I hope you agree that all of them are Blogs.
So my suggested definition would be:

A Blog is as system which aims to log Information on the web in a reverse chronological order. These logged Information have a Permalink and a timestamp.

My first question is if you have additions, comments or other good examples (maybe with a reference) to help me define what a blog is.
My second question is how one could seperate “the traditional” Weblog format (like a wordpress Blog) from the term Blog. Is Blog just summing up the different Blog formats? What would you do?

PS: Ihr dürft auch gerne auf deutsch antworten…

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Medien & Design

What does an educational microblogging service need?

von Ralf Appelt 4. Juni 2009 Kommentare0

etherpadLast time in my Seminar about blogging in education we talked about the question if one would like to use microblogging in education, what would be needed to be a good educational microblogging service.
To discuss that and share some general information we used an etherpad document. And I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that instead of just thinking about the task everyone started creating content in this document. I shared the Information that we are working on this right now on twitter an so other seminar participants who can’t joint today and other twitter users joined as well. Thanks for that!

In my opinion the collected features might exclude each other sometimes, but it is a first collection and might be improved during the next weeks.

PS: During working with etherpad we discovered that there is a limitation to 8 users working on the document at the same time.

Intermediate Results at the end of the seminar: Weiterlesen

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Teaching Uni

Twitter and Blogs in Seminars – my (beta)Concept

von Ralf Appelt 9. März 2009 Kommentare2

microblogging-educationNext semester I am going to host a Seminar which will try to make use of Blogs and Twitter. I’ll try to communicate a lot with the students using these tools. We will talk about pedagogical media theory and the way these tools could be used for learning.

Concept

My idea is that the students write short notes, exchange links and share ideas using the microblogging service. Reflections, media enhanced texts and structred ideas and findings should be collected within the blogs.
I would state that the mobile options and the factor that microblogging messages are cut down to 140 characters will make it easier and hopefully more fun to post also seminar related content. Later on the tweets could be used to make blogposts out of them, so there is some own material available before starting to write a blogpost.
I am not yet sure how, if and if yes where to aggregate all the content but are interested in suggestions. I made good experiences with keeping one blog as the aggregating central for all students blogs, but how about the tweets?
I would be happy if I can add a story about collaboration after the seminar, especially because I am sure that at least some of my seminar participants won’t meet in the seminar room because they’re from abroad.
The challange will be to connect the students and let them research/create the content of the seminar so that they can see wether these tools are a benefit for them or not. I would be happy if we could develop scenarios in which one or both of these tools might be meanimgful in educational contexts. But maybe the students don’t see a use for these tools in education, that would be ok too.

Additions

Inspired by a tweet of @trebors I decided to create the suhh group at tweetworks for this seminar.
I collectet some Links for the students concerning our topic at del.icio.us which is handed to them as a kind of preparation. If you’re interested in more of my links at delicious concerning twitter and blogging in educational contexts this is the right link for you.

Next steps

If there will be feedback from people who have worked with twitter in seminars already who can offer helpful hints they will influence my concept. Otherwise I will at least create/set up something to collect the blog entrys and prepare some tasks which will bring life into the students blogs and twitteraccounts, so that they will not only talk about blogging and microblogging in education but also “feel” those tools in the educational context.
Posting some feedback could be your next step 😉

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft Teaching Uni

Advertising and Education

von Ralf Appelt 5. März 2009 Kommentare0

IAs you might already know I like to use blogs with my students. Because my students should just learn how to use blogs it is important that they have a possibility to try blogging for free. Till now I always recommended Edublogs.org because in comparison to wordpress.com they offer free podcasting, just in case anybody would like to use it.

Today I had one of my students in my consultation-hours and I was a little bit shocked when she showed me her blog on edublogs. In my opinion edublogs always offered a great service to education related people who wan’t to blog. Today my mind changed completely. Not only that edublogs added classical google ads (black arrows) to the newest posts, they also hyperlink text within the blogposts to differnt products (orange arrows). What I don’t like about this that as far as I know the users havent been informed about the change and that it is not that obvious to the visitors why ther is a ad-link in the text and who placed it.
eduads-1
Screenshot taken fom: http://lyra0809.edublogs.org/2009/03/03/task-1-experience-with-e-learning/

Kategorie: English Medien & Design

Pedagogical Media Theory – Blogging and its possible relation to education

von Ralf Appelt 4. März 2009 Kommentare1

Description for my Seminar in Summer 2009:

blogging

Since Blogs are an easy way to publish information to the web the use of them is still increasing, even in educational settings. The question for this seminar is how could blogging and microblogging be used efficently for teachers and learners. What are traps and what are benefits in using those technologies for learning processes? What kind of understanding of the relation between teacher and student are common and meaningful if social software is used in education? We will deal with different learning theories and how they adapt to blogging. You will also try blogging and microblogging during the seminar to discover relevant aspects for judging about the relevance and to take didactical aspects in account for future learning arrangements.

Links for this Seminar will be bookmarked at delicious with the tag: seminarappeltsose2009

This Course will take place between Apr. 7th 2009 and Jul. 14th 10:00 – 12:00 h (cet).

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft Teaching Uni