EduBlog Insights

Belinda Davis Lazarus of the University of Michigan has an interesting study in the September, 2003 Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. The study is entitled “Teaching Courses Online : How Much Time Does It Take?

An excerpt from the summary:

This study attempted to measure the amount of time needed to teach three online courses. The data collected across the three courses were fairly consistent and indicated that teaching courses online requires between 3 Π and 7 hours per week. The graduate level course required 30 √ 45 minutes per week longer that the introductory courses. However the time commitment is within reasonable expectations, but unlike live courses that meet between 1 and 3 times per week, the instructor needs to be online and available to students each day. Participating in and grading the online discussions takes the greatest amount of time, however, the discussions show that the students posted 4 to 5 times as many messages as the instructor. Consequently, consistent with principles of effective instruction, students had more opportunities to respond and interact in the online courses than in live, lecture-type courses.

This study piqued my interest. Students having more opportunities to respond and interact fits for courses set up on weblogs, too. As I am checking posts and comments made by our Literature Group, I’m using Bloglines to expedite the reading of posts but am wondering if there is a way to expedite reading of comments. Just want to make sure I am not missing something I should be aware of here.

Will’s post today about mo’time Web Logs is of particular interest to me.  I’ve been thinking about what weblog software to use for the online session for ESL teachers that I will be doing in January. I need it to be free so the ESL teachers taking our course will be able to create their own blogs during the course. This sounds like it might just fit the bill.  I wanted a free one that would allow for comments. I wish it had pictures, too, but that is not as important as the comments. I’m going to be sure to try this one out.  We’ll be using Manila for the course blog, but I’m curious if anyone has strong recommendations on the many free ones that seem to be appearing recently.  I’m having trouble keeping up with them - that’s a good thing though!

Or does anyone know where there is a good comparison of the various free ones?

Yesterday I had the first session with the Thinking & Wrinkles group.  It’s going to be a good learning journey - great group of kids combined with a terrific school with wonderful educators!  How much better can it get?

I’m at the beginning of yet another project.  This one will be conducting an online session on a Yahoo group for ESL teachers. It will begin in January. Last year myself and another moderator for the group conducted a session entitled Creating an Online Magazine for Student Writing.  This upcoming session will be on creating and using weblogs in ESL.  We’re just at the beginning stages so more later….

Today I taught a small group of GSU students about weblogs.  One of the students is going to present this to her class as part of a project she is doing.  Another student immediately saw the possibilities of this type of website as compared to ones we are used to viewing at schools. All of them asked really good questions and were excited about what they were learning. 

Julie gave me permission to share her weblog with you.  The others may later.

Julie writes on Corey’s Corner:

“I have been very negligent in my writing and posting on the weblog.  This will soon change because I am preparing to student teach and intend to use my blog as a way to entice students to write about the math they are learning.  Mathematical expression should not take the form of equations, and inequalities only; rather, students should learn to talk about math in much the same way as they talk about current events.  What I mean by that is that math, like any other subject, involves making new discoveries and learning to do something today that you did not know yesterday.  If students express their ideas with one another, that discussion can help to enhance their thinking.” 

Yes, one by one….. This kind of discussion is soooo good.

Today is the final training session for my Literature Circles group.  I met with half of the class this morning and will meet with the other half in about an hour. The groups switched times today so the group that came in the afternoon last week came in the morning today.  We reviewed last week’s lesson.  The students who had had the opportunity to read their books began to post.  I had handouts ready on the different reading roles.  We discussed these again, pointing out that based on their input we may change existing roles or add new ones.  They said that was very helpful to have to refer to as they were posting. 

Next, they created Navigation links.  Those are sooooo easy now!!  Thank you, Jake!  Students created links to each other’s sites.  They named their sites the name of the Newbery books they had chosen.  I explained pictures and stories although I am not sure that will use either of those features for this project.  I encouraged them to really think about weblog possibilities.  Sometimes this is hard when you are new to weblogs but if we get them thinking, I know these students will come up with good ideas.  I asked them to keep the students in mind as we were working on this project.  What do they think will work well, what will not?  I suggested they think ahead to when they would be student teaching.

It has been wonderful to have three sessions to teach this.  In the past, I have been lucky to get one hour and that just is not enough time to do it right. Thank you, Mrs. Jordan! All these students know they can come to me or email me with any questions, ideas, problems that occur. 

So we’re off and running!  Please feel free to comment to them.  You can link to their sites through the Literature Circles EduBlog.  One of them had a comment today from someone none of us knew.  They were so excited even though the comment was to use a larger font!  It’s interesting to see the reactions of all the different age groups to getting comments - it runs pretty much the same no matter what the age.  Doesn’t that show us the importance of feedback from an audience that cares?

Lynne Jordan and I will be continuing to post on the Literacy and Technology Teacher’s EduBlog.

Thinking & Writing Wrinkles is about to begin.  This is a weblog project combining ESL students and their native-English speaking classmates.  I met with the principal and others at J. H. House Elementary School last Thursday.  This Thursday I meet the students!  I am really looking forward to this project!

Geri Corcoran is one of the students in  Dr. Brendan Calandra’s course on the Design and Development of Multimedia for Education and Training.  I had given them a weblog workshop a couple of weeks ago and she has been busy learning all she can.  The students in this class are exploring the use of weblogs to communicate their ideas, and to promote discussion of course readings and related experiences. Geri came down to the ITC today to meet with me for some further training on weblogs.  She is a quick learner and sees possibilities.  She’ll be working with adult learners later.

If you have a moment, make a comment on her site.  Welcome her to the educator’s world of blogging!

This past Tuesday I met with my Literature Circles group.  This is the second time that I have met with them.  For the first class I met with the entire group and used my Weblog Workshop to provide a good overview and have them think about possibilities.  This group will be doing their student teaching in January so this is perfect timing for a class that will be out in the field soon. 

The plan is to learn how to transform a traditional genre to an online environment. Postings will focus on the Newbery Book Project which gives students the opportunity to participate in literature circles. If you want to know more about literature circles see literaturecircles.com.  Students will read and respond on their EduBlogs to selected Newbery books.  Entries will be dated and the department will note the reading role taken by the student. The students selected the following books:

Holes
A View from Saturday
The Giver
Missing May
Number the Stars
Bridge to Terabithia
A Wrinkle in Time
The Witch of Blackbird Pond 

There will be four or five students to each book EduBlog.  They will post comments to each other after postings have been made on the different reading roles.

So, for this training session we began the process of constructing the EduBlogs.  The group is large, 37 students, so I taught two sessions.  That was kind of interesting because I did not have complete groups (with the exception of one in the afternoon) in the separate sections.  I think it was a little clearer for the morning session as they had more hands on.  First, they posted comments on the Literacy & Technology Instructor’s EduBlog.  I was pleased with their responses.  They’re getting it!  Then we created a new site, filled in the About info, and selected a theme.  The two separate groups will have to vie for the theme.  That should be interesting to see who rises to the top as a negotiator or maybe it’s whoever is the loudest or has the strongest will.  Whatever, learning teamwork as we go.

Next we went into prefs and changed the title and tag line.  Then added a number for our news items (50 for now), and then created the departments.  Then since one student was doing the driving at the computer, others took over and typed in their email addresses in the managing editor slots.

Later, I just changed their sites from discussion to comments.  Next week we will go over the Navigation links, go over pictures and maybe stories and review what we learned.  Then we’ll be up and going.  We’re asking them to make a minimum of two entries on the EduBlog per week and two comments per week.  We hope they might do more.  We’ll see. 

Some had some really good thoughts when they were posting comments on our EduBlog.  I told them to save them and post those Learning Reflections on their own EduBlog.  We also have a department called Weblog Possibilities so we hope to get some good ideas there.

I’m also teaching this group how to create WebQuests.  They’ll do it on the book they have selected.  Whew!  A busy semester, but I am so excited about working with this group.  The instructor meets with me outside of class and I feel like we have set it up well.  Hey, please feel free to comment when we get up and going!  Suggestions are always welcomed!

I’m back and my weblog is working now.  Last Wednesday I was writing a story about my weblog woes and didn’t get it finished as I had to leave abruptly to get to the hospital for the birth of my granddaughter.  It’s been a great week, both at home and work.  Genesis will be one week old tomorrow!

Yesterday I had a session with the Literature group - that is going to be so good!  I will write about it as soon as I get a few moments.  Tomorrow morning I travel back to J. H. House to meet with the principal to discuss this year’s weblog project with ESL students and their mentors.  I can’t wait!  More later….

Here’s the story:  Weblog Withdrawal

September 10, 2003

My day started with a bang!  I opened up my weblog and this message popped up on my screen:

Sorry.  There was an error:  Array index is out of range.  The table structure doesn’t have an item #1.

What in the world is this?  I panic and send out an email to every other weblogger I have an email address for.  At the same time I’m really worrying about myself that this weblog is causing me to freak out. I had things to write and I don’t want to wait.  OK, I tell myself, have patience. This is just a weblog. Then Tim (my co-worker)  comes in and I don’t even give him a chance to sit down before I bombard him with what’s going on. He’s worried that I will take a bludgeon to him if he does not solve this problem so he gets right on it and proceeds to contact Lawrence Lee at Frontier.

So, I go back to other items I need to do, and try (without success) to put this out of my mind.

Then the emails start coming in my mailbox.  Will is first to the rescue (Isn’t it great to have those you can always count on?) and chimes in with just the right amount of sympathy to make me feel better.

Not a good day for Manila…my school server’s down again…yuck…

You might want to e-mail Lawrence at Userland directly: lawrence@userland.com. He’s been pretty good about getting back to me when I have bad issues.

Sorry for your problems…really stinks doesn’t it?

Then Tim Lauer offers help (and he’s a new principal so I know how busy he is!).

The fix will most likely involve some kind of update/script from

userland and then a rebuild. When I was running Manila I found the guys who work for Userland to be very helpful. I would suggest writing to Lawrence Lee. I did a little looking around and see from the discussion forum that you have Tim Merritt on the job… I have found that writing them directly sometimes moves things along quicker.

I start thinking about what a great community we have, “our group of webloggers.”  That sense of community is what it is all about.  There’s no way you can get that in the 4 walls of a classroom.  And the spirit of help and giving is overwhelming.  Thanks to everyone! 

OK, back to the day.  Next comes a message from Lawrence Lee who has heard from Al Delgado about my plight.  Lawrence is ready and willing to help.  I’m really impressed.  Will had said he was pretty good about getting back to him when he had bad issues.  I would say so.  Wow!  Not only is our community great but the Frontier community is terrific, too.

I’m also more than impressed with Al because he goes another extra mile and forwards my question on to Sam DeVore, also.  Sam always has excellent suggestions.  I’m getting excited now because I am beginning to understand the solutions (even if I can’t implement them yet!)  I need to let Sam know that Tim sits right next to me here at Georgia State. Sam has rescued us many times in the past and we are always amazed at his generosity.  Thank you, Sam!

Do you have access to the server (or know someone who does?)  This is often an indication of a root file (the data structure of Frontier) has

some problems and it is often fixed by saving a copy of the database

that holds the weblog and replacing the old version with the new one. 

This can happen if your log gets a lot of traffic and your website is

getting large.

Sam comes back again with even more suggestions to a follow-up question I tossed his way.

No problem, let Tim know that he can email me anytime (I can’t

guarantee answers though ;)  On preventing this, it depends on what the problems turns out to be.  My first suggestion would be to look at

putting all the high traffic weblogs in individual root files, to make

sure that homepage caching is turned on, and try as much as possible to have frontier not serve any static content ( I would love to see the

ability to static render rss feeds to another server (I have played

around with this and it is a big help. The splitting off of the websites into individual roots is a big thing because it really expands your flexibility in backing up the high traffic (and therefore more problematic roots)

And then Pam comes along with encouraging words

ARGGHHHH…Anne, you’ve got to be going crazy.  I’ve never had that.  I hope you¢â¡Áve found someone that has helped you to fix it.  That’s the one thing about Manila. It’s buggy sometimes (though, I’m sure the other CMS are too, I’m just not as familar with them).

I wish I could help you, but I don’t know what is causing that error message.  Sometimes, I get weird messages, but usually if I close my browser and reopen it fixes it.  Let me know if its not fixed and I’ll post it on my blog that you need help and maybe someone who knows will respond to the posting.

Pam is always the encourager.  She perked me up!  We frequently bounce ideas back and forth and she is always so willing to help.

No, I don’t have my weblog back yet because the day’s schedule could not just come to a halt, much as Tim and I would have liked to just throw everything to the side and work on weblogs.  But, tomorrow is another day and I reminisced on a post Will made the other day.

Educators are using blogs to help students express themselves and learn from each other.

Hmmm…is that what we’re doing? Sounds so, I dunno, vapid, doesn’t it? (I kinda picture this as a line from a “Betty Boop Talks Web Logs” documentary.) Sure feels like there’s more depth to all of this from where I sit at least. But, hey, ok…I understand…space constraints. It’s just a teaser. I can live with it…

It’s a heck of a lot more than that!  We are building a dynamic on-line community of educators who want to make a difference with our students. Plus we’re there for each other. We see the changing nature of learner needs as well as the changing nature of educator needs.  Our learning community is dynamic.  Knowledge and ideas are  shared, mulled over, “tweaked”, and we are constantly trying to make it better.  I keep learning from this wonderful community.  Thank you Tim M., Will, Tim L., Al, Lawrence, Sam, Pam and everyone else out there in our weblogging community. 

And the community keeps growing…isn’t it exciting?