Research Diary: Blogs and Eportfolios in Higher Education

Worlds AIDS Day Blogs

People living with AIDS, AIDS research, AIDS caregivers, AIDS fundraising, AIDS orphans, AIDS activists -- the blogosphere is surely busy around the subject of HIV.  What better day than World AIDS Day to sample some of the many, many offerings on this crucial subject.  Bizarre question: does the number of blogs exceed the number of AIDS sufferers worldwide?  Here's one place to look for links... http://www.hivforum.com/blogs/

Critic's Blogs on Books Etc.

Answering my own question in the last post (about the literary criticism of blogs) I did a bit more googling on the subject.  So far, there's more criticism in blogs than criticism about blogs.  For example, here are four popular sites that give some hint of the iceburg of critical information out there on virtually any subject, all from something called the Internet Public Library -- which is quite a concept in itself! http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/hum60.20.00/

Blogcritics.org

http://blogcritics.org/index.php
A collaborative blog where bloggers review "music, books, film, popular culture, and technology." Popular culture is a grab bag of responses to politics, recent news items, controversial issues, and things to see and do around the country and the world (like the Dachua Beer festival). One can also find discussions/responses to current events in music, books, and film here.

BookBlog

http://www.bookblog.net/
A book discussion group that meets once a month online. Each member of BookBlog volunteers to choose a book, begin the discussion by making the first post, and moderate that discussion.

bookreporter.com

http://www.bookreporter.com/
Browse by category or search for recent book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews, done just for the Bookreporter. Reviews range from a paragraph to a page with the longer reviews being signed.

Bookslut

http://www.bookslut.com/index.php
Proclaiming a deep love of books and promising to judge judiciously, this site is both a monthly web magazine and a daily blog, providing news, reviews, and commentary. The site was created by the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jessa Crispin.

ETUDES NG to include ePortfolio Tool

Foohthill's own home-brewed online education software, known as ETUDES, will include ePortfolio capabilities in it's new format (known as ETUDES-NG).  The "NG" in the title stands for "the Next Generation" for you non-Star-Trek fans.  FIrst found out about this a few days ago by emailing our dean of online education, Vivian Sinou, on other matters.  But what an exciting development.  If an individualized  ePortfolio can be linked to each online class for each student, we'll have a powerful, flexible, functional model for the ePortfolios of the future.  This is a next generation learning tool in more ways than one!

Open Source Portfolios at Foothill

Foothill's Online Courses will begin adding an ePortfolio option as soon as the new version of our course software (EtudesNG) comes out next year.  Right now it's in the testing phase...so I took the "guided tour" which the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) consortium offers.  Here's my first impressions -- not all of them positive!

Dear OSP Designers,

I'm a

Foothill

College

faculty member (English Dept) with interest in the future of ePortfolios.

Found out about your OSP project from Vivian Sinou, our Foothill College Dean of Online Everything. Decided to take the guided tour.  Since you asked for first impressions, and even offered up an email address, here's a few of my reactions:

1.  COLORS, PHOTOS, AND STORIES:  Great idea to use individual stories to help organize the guided tour presentation.  Definitely makes it seem more "human" and accessible.  Loved the colorful Matrix and splashy graphics too.

2.  JARGON:  While impressed, overall, with the architecture of your OSP, I'm disappointed with the word-choice, especially the labelling of key functions (hey, remember, I'm an English Professor--so I'm picky).

Specifically, I found some of your  key categories/concepts to be tedious, jargony, techy, confusing and overall and off-putting for low-tech types like myself.

For example, your "CIGs" category is an excellent concept -- but how many people know what a CIG is without being told first?  Couldn't you just call them  "Groups" or "Discussion Groups" or spell out "Common Interest Groups" without resorting to the acronym. And yes, I'm well aware that savvy net-users have been familiar with this particular acronym for years. But what about the rest of us?

There are numerous instances of similar (unnecessary?) "tech-talk" in your presentation software. For example, does everyone have to learn what webDAV is?  Couldn't this be explained, in terms of its function, a bit more simply?

3.  A related concern was the (relative) lack of concrete examples to click through when it comes to content. I realize things are still in the very early stages, but it would sure help if, say, Jennifer had a full portfolio of presentations, essays, reports, projects, community service, and other activities we could click through. 

4.  Absent this richer portfolio content, the general impression I'm given by your guided tour is that that the whole eportfolio experience will boil down to checking off boxes in a rigid matrix, filling out tedious forms, and receiving mildly insulting one-sentence comments from faceless instructors who check "incomplete" in my matrix box and send me back to the drawing board unassisted.

5.  Another area of concern is the lack of an "administrator," "parent," or "employer" in your spectrum of user profiles.  Aren't these people potentially key participants in the ePortfolio process also?

All these areas point to the need for a richer, more robust, more user-friendly set of examples and functions than what has been provided so far.   These richer, more robust examples might (in turn) spell the difference between an "oh god, do we have to?" response to a "Wow, this looks like fun" reaction.  From "gotta-do" to "wanna-do is a long journey.  But without the "wanna-do" factor, will instructors and students ever really "wanna" use this thing in the first place?

EduBlog Basics

Tried setting up my own "free blog for educators" through the site on http://://edublogs.org/.  It's a fantastic concept, and I'll certainly recommend it to my students who are looking for a free blogsite this winter.  However, it's more limited than I'm used to with typepad (so I don't think I'll end up using it myself).  The graphics interface was especially limiting: you can't paste in photos as easily, for example.  And you pretty much have to switch to a Firefox browser instead of Internet Explorer (which won't support photos for edublog at all).  Given the "free" service none of this is very serious.  And some of their new blogs seem fascinating!

Black Buddhism Blog

An article in this month's print magazine BuddhaDharma featured a fascinating list of blogs-for-buddhists (a great example of the micro-niche phenomenon that helps makes blogging so popular).  For a niche-within-a-niche, the "Zen Under the Skin" site is a memorable -- and well written -- site focusing on the concerns of African American Buddhists.  Surely this is a sub-group that doesn't get much attention in mainstream Buddhist publications (if "mainstream" even applies to anything buddhist in America at all).  It also shows how people can be drawn in to a complete conversation, a whole world of practice and philosophy of living, through the needle's-eye portal of a single blog.  Being There by Blogging.  Can blogging be aform of daily meditation?

Free Blogs Now!

I'll be directing students to free blog services (and colleagues when I start in on the staff development training phase of my PDL/sabbatical project), so I want to make a mental note on how to find them.  As usual, the simplest answer is "Google It":  so I tried googling "free blogs" and got a long and useful list of providers.  Blogger, Livejournal, iBlogs, and Blogstream are among the best-known sources. I'll be test driving a few of them myself today, just to get some sense of the similarities and differences between them.  So far, I'd say the similarities are much more overwhelming.  At some base level, aren't all blogs created equal?

Trackbacks, Pingbacks, and Backlinks

This is one of those technical, jargony parts of blogging that causes a lot of confusion (for me, too).  Here's a link that explains it all in pretty much plain language.  Basically, it's all about knowing when/where other bloggers are quoting from and/or responding to your blog in their blog.  Bloggety-bloggety-blog.  Of course this only matters if anyone else happens to be reading your blog in the first place!  So you might want to work on that part first.  Meanwhile, here's a link to the Trackback discussion http://gevkaffeegal.typepad.com/the_alliance/2005/12/bloggers_trackb.html#more

Thought-Processor

I was just mentally running through various easy-quick answers to the eternal question "what is a blog?"  In addition to some of my previous favorites -- an interactive journal, an online diary -- I'd like to add a newer, and slightly whackier, definition:  a blog is a thought-processor.  In other words, a blog is a way of storing, organizing, illustrating, and organizing thoughts on virtually any subject imaginable.  Just as you can use a photoalbum to organize and display images, or a scrapbook to organize and display a particular set of souvenirs, you can use a blog to create an organized record of your thoughts as they occur through time.  In this sense, it's among the more powerful tools ever invented.

Online Letters of Recommendation?

Here's a pushme/pullyou angle on ePortfolios that I hadn't previously considered:  the widespread need for secure, verifiable, and easily accessible letters of recommendation.  For example, I just filed a recommendation letter for one of my previous Foothill Students now studying at UCLA through the ApplyYourself corporation's website at http://www.applyyourself.com/AYiClass/provide.html.  Easy, interesting, secure, and efficient process.  ApplyYourself even automatically notifies  the candidate when the recommendation has been completed (so they can stop bugging you).

Clearly this could/should be a key element of ePortfolios also (one of the factors that might turn a "gotta" into a "wanna" for students who need recommendations.  By filing the recommendations online with samples of their work in college, students would have a highly efficient way of informing employers of their skills, and qualifications--and verifying those skills through letters of recommendation from their instructors.  As those of us who write dozens of letters of recommendation per year, anything that streamlines this cumbersome process would be welcomed by professors.  But corporations and grad/transfer schools would also see their paperwork load reduced exponentially by providing a secure way to organize letters of recommendation online.