Weblogs and Web sites

Title: Weblogs and Web sites : a symbiotic relationship to enhance pedagogy.

Abstract:

The pedagogical advantages of constructing a course web site and using weblogs for student individual and group assignments will be presented. The design features of the web site will be discussed together with the means used to integrate weblogs into the site. The pedagogy of using blogs to contain the student's assignments will be discussed and student evaluations will be presented and commented upon. Finally, the drawbacks to this approach will be discussed.

Overview:

This roundtable will deal with the pedagogical advantages of constructing a course web site for a course entitled "Information Technology and Society" and using weblogs for student individual and group assignments. The design features of the web site which were implemented to enhance usability will be discussed together with the means used to integrate student individual and group weblogs into the site. The pedagogy of using the Moveable Type blog system to contain the student's various assignments, both individual and group efforts, will be discussed. Student evaluations both quantities and qualitative will be presented and commented upon. Finally, the drawbacks to this approach will be discussed together with a comparison of how blogs were used in a different course in the context of a Course Management System (CHEF).

Description:

A web site tailored to the Information Technology and Society course (Management 110) at Earlham College was designed by the instructor prior to its being taught. Incremental improvements were made and content added to the site as the course progressed. Responses to the online evaluation showed that it was well liked by students.

The course web site located at http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/mgmt_2003 was designed with the W3C standards in mind but these were not rigorously adhered to.

• XHMTL & style sheets : a combination of styled boxes and styled tables in the site design made for fast loading pages. Three sets of templates (in Macromedia Dreamweaver) were used to create the all the pages so that changes in the fixed portion of the template (mainly menu items) could quickly and easily be replicated throughout the site.
• Visual layout of site followed hierarchy of directories in web site with the aim of being able to navigate from one page to any other within three clicks. Overview of three levels used together with literature reference.
• Navigation options. Menu arrangements, links to major and minor category pages and breadcrumb links were made appropriate to the function of the individual page and the category level at which it was located.
• Integrating RSS feeds from student and project blogs into the site. This gave the instructor a single point to track whether assignments have been done and also allowed students to track other group's progress. eg http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/mgmt_2003/projects/
• Assessment. The vast majority of students (90%) checked the web site for assignments and grades and 95% found it useful or very useful to have all the course material available on the class web site.

The blog format for content management provided a flexible focus for student individual & cooperative work. Each student had a personal blog located in his/her web site and was a member of a group blog. The group blogs were hosted from the group leader's web site and he/she enabled posting from each group member. All the student blogs were linked to from the course web site (Class Projects / Blogs), so there was a single point of access to both personal and group blogs.

• Personal blogs were located in the student's own web space. Classwork assignments generally asked for reflections on the class exercise of the day to be entered into the blog, homework assignments comprised text entries, links to web pages they had created and uploaded graphic images, presentations and spreadsheets. The Textile formatting option made creating tables with a blog entry easy enough so that a table presentation of homework could be used before covering html tables in class.
• The Group blogs were implemented for a group cooperative effort and were hosted on the group leader's web site. Here were posted project resources, site designs, stylesheets, and presentations.
• Although students had access to each other's blogs there was little or no trouble with plagiarism. 80% of the class somewhat or strongly agreed that "uploading all your work into your blog was a great way of working" while 93% of the class agreed that "the group blog was useful for working as a team". Evidence of helpful pedagogy here.

• The Free Assessment Summary Tool at http://www.getfast.ca was used as the online evaluation instrument. 17 questions probing student's views of different aspects of the course were asked, and numeric responses were downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet numeric responses and custom pie charts created.

• The overhead of designing an accessible, fast loading web site was considerable but worth it.
• Configuring a personal weblog using the Moveable Type system was difficult and prone to user error event with explicit and detailed instructions. Particularly dangerous were mistakes made in specifying the location of the blog archives since such mistakes tended not to surface for some time after the blog had been used.
• Grading. Although homework assignments were on the web, the grades had to be entered into a spreadsheet and then processed. Students were given a code number via personal email and this was used to key into a table of grades added to the course web site. The overhead of this process was considerable and there may be questions about the level of privacy that this afforded.
• Similarly private feedback online not possible.

Much of the course web site mimics the functionality provided by a general purpose Course Management System (CMS). Student blogs were also used in the context of the CHEF open source CMS for an introductory class called Living Learning and Community. Student reactions to this combination will be discussed.