My career to this point has been an interesting combination of writing, training, producing videos, coding, and webmastering. Recently I read a blog entry by Jon Udell that puts all of those activities into one combined context. Read that entry here.
Udell writes about the emerging art form of using screen capture software and scripted narrative to produce a multimedia piece that communicates something important about a program or the code behind a program. As I try to learn more about programming technologies like ASP.NET, I think this would be a great way to share ideas with other programmers and maybe ask for peer review of what I am learning how to do. Cool stuff!
This will be my final entry in this blog for CI5336. I will try to keep this blog going for use in future classes and to bring up any ideas I come across that I want to share (and have time to work on).
Most blog entries for CI5336 have been related to instructional design case studies from one of the texts for the class. This entry will be about the process of blogging compared to other other computer mediated modes of sharing information.
My final instructional design project for CI5336 was a design document for a tutorial on use of computer conferencing (aka discussion forums) in an academic environment. In the process of doing the research for that project, I became intrigued by how computer conferencing could be used to enhance classroom discussion or provide the benefits of discussion in a distance education class.
I think that discussion forums have some distinct advantages over blogs when the goal is to get students to put their thoughts in front of each other and then think critically about the ideas and information others bring forward.
For one thing, I found it difficult to visit everyone's blog. Members of CI5336 have their blogs on different servers and different formats. Even the simple fact that most members did not use HTML formatting when they listed their blogs, so you couldn't just click on a link. You had to cut and paste the address or type it in.
Even though WebCT Vista has some deficiencies as a discussion forum tool, it would at least serve to keep everyone's comments together and would do a better job of threading sequential comments. Formatting would be more consistent. Linking to different web sites would not be necessary.
The number of blogs for the class made it difficult to track what different member were saying and who was responding to the blogs. I can see now that discussion forums offer some potential for setting up small discussion groups of 5 - 7 members. Only time and experience will demonstrate the optimal number of group members, and whether groups should be mixed and shuffled for each topic or kept intact through the extent of a course.
So, in summary, blogs seem to be a good tool for sending your ideas out to a relatively unknown and faceless audience and discussion forums (computer conferencing) seems to be a good tool for building a community of inquiry within a class.