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Digital natives and the class blogging blues

Book and Computer

It’s been quite a week and a bit getting a new class of students signed up and into blogging on a group project. I’ve written before on the apparent e-learning challenges to students, and on some of the roadblocks I’ve encountered with their digiphobia. This time round, very few found the process of signing up with edublogs … the platform I’d chosen for the class blog … to be a trial. It seemed that following the instructions and getting themselves signed in with user names was just too complicated to bother persisting. Keep the approach simple, but no simpler (thanks Einstein).

However, I’m wondering after the past 10 days whether, rather than the unfamiliar navigation in a new environment being the stumbling block, that it’s not the actual process of reading online that is the real problem.

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E-learning challenges one year on

Footprints

Another year, different students, but how far have we come together with e-learning? Speaking personally, I’m older (I hope wiser) but a lot more savvy in the way I use and continue to experiment in e-learning. As the old Chinese proverb has it … it’s the journey not the arrival (or some such) through which satisfaction and true acheivement arise.
But is there a sense in the air that we’ve moved on, in however small a way along the road? Are the majority of students we work with any more savvy and less technophobic than they were 12 months ago? Are institutions making it easier for teachers to develop their own e-learning skills via professional development and/or easy to use CMS (course management systems)? Have telcos brought down the costs of web access ensuring that ubiqitous little ‘fourth screen’ can become a handheld e-learning device? Do pigs fly?

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3 simple elegant tools

  • 25 February, 2008
  • 0 Comment
  • Blogging
  • Posted by Kate Foy


Creative Commons License photo credit: WriterBarb

I wrote recently about good design and some of the aesthetic principles from the philosophy of Zen, and which inform my personal preferences. I wanted to list a couple of small tools which fit the bill in terms of ease of use and elegance. I find myself calling on them constantly for their convenience and reliability. They save time, and they just plain work. What’s more they are fine time savers with a purpose.

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Moving house from WordPress.com to .org: to begin at the beginning …

  • 30 January, 2008
  • 0 Comment
  • Blogging
  • Posted by Kate Foy

Can o’WormsIt’s summer outside and lots of other people are out there enjoying the joys of the great outdoors … hitting the surf, strolling the countryside, and just hanging out as you do on these long, sunny days. It’s an outdoorsy time for most, but not for me. I’ve been hanging out at my desk, and for a lot of the time, staring at a screen.

Since making the big move from Wordpress.com across to my own domain using Wordpress.org, I’ve been steadily tinkering away under the hood. I now have some idea of what it’s like when people get caught up with reconditioning things: clocks, cars, and other sundry ‘machines.’ It’s what goes on underneath that makes the outside … eventually … work so well. Well of course, anything to do with machines, engines, algebra, coding and anything vaguely associated with mathematics has guaranteed a vertical learning curve for this non-DIY little arty. I’ve had the smile wiped off my face more than a few times along the way, but right now, I’m feeling pretty darned pleased with myself. As a result, I wanted to write about how I got from where I was to where I am now blog-wise. If and when you decide to make the break to your own domain, you might find this longish post useful. You might also find some nuggets here if you’re thinking about making a move from another blogging content management system (CMS) to Wordpress.

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Tag or Category: let’s get organised

  • 23 January, 2008
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  • Blogging
  • Posted by Kate Foy

Question

It’s blog makeover time I declare. I spent a good deal of last Sunday afternoon doing a tidy-up of the blog. The sidebars were starting to flow over, and I was particularly unimpressed with the way the category cloud looked totally useless … a mass or mess of words which I reckon would be daunting for a visitor to say the least. Time to sort things out.

Wordpress 2.1 now supports tags, and those of us who had been organising our posts using both tags and categories, tossing in every possible relevant key-word, were faced with tag and category clouds which looked like a storm about to break. It’s nice now to be able to get some organisation into the blog, and to ask what use tags and categories serve. At the end of Sunday I felt good, like you do after a big clean out of a messy cupboard or file system. I’ve lost the tags … well, I hadn’t been using them for ages, not since I migrated from Blogger. My category cloud has reduced itself down to the lean animal you can see on the right. In fact I have only now got 8 parent categories, with the kids nestling underneath. What does this all mean?

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Fulfilling Readers’ Expectations…the great and the small

  • 21 January, 2008
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  • Blogging
  • Posted by Kate Foy

Image: Expectations dcjohn Looking back over a year or more of blog posts, I can see a profound change in my blog’s focus … for the better. Back then it was a collage of the personal, professional, and even a smattering of the political. Now it is focussed on the by-line which guides my writing:

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Turbocharged linking and snow on my desktop

  • 3 January, 2008
  • 0 Comment
  • Blogging
  • Posted by Kate Foy

And of course this post from 2007 which was prepared on Spinning’s former incarnation (on WordPress.com) had gently falling snowflakes across its face. Not any more, sadly. We’re now in WordPress.org and the snow has melted. If you do have a WordPress.com blog, lucky you for this sweet little festive feature. Somewhere up there, it’s

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