This blog entry talks about how a junior- and senior-level business course in databases created blogophere around the course. It also highlights some of the advantages of blogs in an educational setting. Some great quotes are….
One comment from another blog about this project is
“Ultimately, blogs are probably a tool best suited for a constructivist learning environment.” – MaryH
With my recent interested in constructivism and moodle, my ears, or eyes in this case, perked up.
When answering the question “why blogs instead of technology X?” The answer really clarified some things in my head
“By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit your pages or even delete them.
Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution.
Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me.”
I’d like to see a class using blogs here to try the aggregation part. That would really tie it together. We have a free aggregator available that could be used to build a basic “river of news” feedreader. Though I think the solution the class used would be better.
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