Kategorie: Uni

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

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

Review of a Seminar with Blogs, a Wiki and more

von Ralf Appelt 3. September 2008 Kommentare4

In this post I’m going to review my first Seminar held at the university to share my experiences with you and get some Feedback for improvement. I will seperate this review into the following parts:

  1. Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Goals)
  2. Approach (Schedule, Tools, …)
  3. Experiences
  4. Findings

  1. Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Objectives)

    2. The Seminar was held at the University of Hamburg during Summersemester 2008. It was intended to be a Seminar for Students of Educational Science from Hamburg and for Students who are in the international MA Programme ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building located at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki – it’s Students are spread around the whole Globe like Weiterlesen

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft Learning Medien & Design Teaching

Back from Holiday – just a few links

von Ralf Appelt 21. August 2008 Kommentare0

Hi all,

it has been preety quiet here the past few weeks. Sorry for that but I had a lot of work to do followed by great holidays. Now I’d like to share some links with you which might be interesting.

  1. 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers
  2. Presentation: Designing New Learning Landscapes (George Siemens)
  3. Twitter in Education Link 1 Link 2
  4. 20 Free eBooks About Social Media

May be I missed some important links during the past weeks. Please let me know!

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft

Microlearning 2008

von Ralf Appelt 27. Juni 2008 Kommentare0

Thanks to Twemes and Martin Ebners Twitter Messages I get at least a Impression of what is going on at the Microlearning Conference 2008 in Innsbruck/Austria.
E.g. Judy Breck [Blog 1, Blog 2] with her Keynote about the Cloud in Education she states that:

Delivering the cloud to individual students is the key mobile role for education.

The node junction between web assets is the most important component of online learning.

That sounds a lot like George Siemens idea of Connectivism to me.

In her Keynote she presents a

3 Step Plan to complete before 2012

  1. No more pencils – mobile and connectivity to all school age kids
  2. No textbooks – schools use open educational resources online
  3. No more searching gobbledygook – educators and mobilists focus on learning content

Martin Ebners presentation titled “Has the end of chalkboard come? A survey about the limits of Interactive Pen Displays in Higher Education” could be a nice base for evaluating interactive whiteboards within our ePush Project.


That’s it so far. For me it is nice to get these impressions. Thanks a lot to the contributers!

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Learning Medien & Design

How to share Seminar Material online

von Ralf Appelt 17. Juni 2008 Kommentare2

Having a Webpage or a Blog for a Seminar becomes more and more popular. The times where you have to copy whole folders of seminal content are rarely over because of different good reasons.

Get it online

One can easily upload different kinds of files to the own webpage to make them available to the students. Usually Slides, Texts, Images, Videos or even a collection of Links are published on websites.

Share

The Web offers a lot of Options to share your Seminar stuff with others on social sharing services. This is helpful to avoid the reinvention of the wheel, to get credits and Feedback from others, even from people who are not within that particular seminar but interested in the topic.

Make it work

Most of those social sharing services do not only offer the storage of files. They usually offer user profiles, categories and tagging for your content. Another very useful feature is the embed function. That means you can upload and store your files on theyr server, but they allow you to copy an embed-code from their page to display the content in your blog/website. And further on to embed slideshows or films into your own website usually means that you can watch them without leaving your website.

How To

  1. Find the embed-code (Viddler, Teachertube, Slideshare, Flickr, Scribt, Issuu)
  2. Copy it to your Clipboard
  3. Go to your Blogpost (change to the code editor if you are in wysiwyg-mode)
  4. Paste the code
  5. Be happy 😉

Note: WordPress.com and Edublogs.org sometimes need special code. See their FAQ’s if no special code is offered.
The Screenshots below will show you where to find the embed code.

Services

Video: Viddler, Teachertube
Slides: Slideshare
Images: Flickr
Links: del.icio.us
Text: scribd, issuu

It works like this Video from Teachertube:

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft Medien & Design Teaching

Edumedia 08 – a review

von Ralf Appelt 5. Juni 2008 Kommentare2

It was my first Educational Conference I attended as usual visitor. The location St. Virgil in Salzburg was very useful. The Wifi was a little bit weak some times (as Martin already mentioned) and it seems that the eInfrastructure is more important than one thinks sometimes. A lot of the participants where hunting sockets, especially close to the rooms where the sessions took place. Even more important were the Tracks, Forums and Keynotes and I want to sum up my Impressions.

ePortfolio Expert Forum

Weiterlesen

Kategorie: English ePedagogy Design Erziehungswissenschaft