The leadership of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an association of 200 universities, museums, corporations, etc., recently published their second annual Horizon Report (PDF), which tries to identify and describe areas of emerging technology that will become increasingly significant to higher education over the next one to five years.
The report is a worthwhile read for those interested in academic technology (even if a couple of the examples, such as integrating cellphones into the teaching and learning experience, seem a bit impractical).
Unsurprisingly, the report details blogging as an important emerging technology and relates it both to “extended learning” and “social networks and knowledge webs.”
The potential of these tools [blogs, wikis, and other asynchronous forums] is to connect students in new ways, in new groupings, and for new purposes. Where these tools are being applied, ownership of the process of discovering or aquiring knowledge is beginning to move from the teacher alone into the hands of the educational group comprised of teachers and students.
The wheels of change at my dear alma mater are renowned for their glacial movement. Blogging, unfortunately, is one area where my university, in its role as internet service provider, has really fallen behind. As a result, members of our university community who want to blog have had to turn to third party ISPs or a free service like Blogger (as our university’s student government recently did). Free (as in beer) services are great—as long as their terms of service don’t unexpectedly change. Also, such services, especially the ad-supported variety, are not really ideal for institutional use.
For some inexplicable (and very frustrating) reason, Movable Type will not run under individual accounts on our university’s main server. I have been unsuccessful at getting MT’s scripts to execute since the fall of 2003. Grrrr. I have successfully installed WordPress, but this required use of our new limited access pre-production PHP server. A member of our department was finally able to sidestep the bureaucratic red tape and get a dedicated Linux server for blogging up and running this past fall, but we haven’t been able to really publicize it. Also, a centralized environment is great for classroom use and maybe for institutional use, but not so well suited for individual use by students, professors, and smaller student groups.
Some of our professors have been having their students publish web sites in lieu of traditional papers for at least the last six years. However, the tool of choice was usually Dreamweaver, which can have a rather steep learning curve. I noticed a few things as I trained these students in Dreamweaver.
- Many of the students had no interest in web design and did not care to learn this program, so they didn’t pay attention in the training sessions and found themselves lost during the last week before the due date.
- Because these were group projects, students who considered themselves “technically challenged” tended to over-rely on their more tech savvy classmates, letting them do all the work. When each member of a group assumed that someone else was the tech savvy one, as happened on more than one occasion, all members were clueless about what they were supposed to do.
- Some of the students were so clueless, it was often very tempting for our staffers who were assisting them to do the work for them while the students passively observed (treading dangerously close to an honor code violation).
- Content on some of these sites was surprisingly lackluster (esp. for ivy leaguers). They concentrated so much on learning and using Dreamweaver and figuring out their sites’ architectures, the content really suffered.
With a blog, the learning curve isn’t quite so steep, and so far, we have been working with the professors to develop a standard site architecture ahead of time. The training session for the Movable Type authoring interface was less than an hour, versus three to four hours for Dreamweaver (plus hours of additional face-to-face guidance). The students in a freshman seminar I am currently working with did, however, complain to their professor that the blog software took too long to figure out. However, I agree with the professor’s assessment that the students were just being lazy and didn’t even bother to read the tutorial I carefully prepared.
Having quickly figured things out, though, they have been authoring a fair number of quality blog entries. It is kind of a thrill to see what these kids have posted to their sites so far. I have found it especially thrilling when they have gone above and beyond what I taught them.
It will be interesting to see how well the use of blogs in our classrooms scales upward. Right now blogging is treading a fine line between being a pilot program and being a production service, and support has been kind of ad hoc. Because we have had to sell the idea of using blog software, we have bent over backward to handle the professors’ special requests. A couple of us have invested considerable time crafting customized versions of the MT templates and writing tutorials that are specific to those templates.
I am thinking that it will be best if we develop a set number of templates, with varying levels of features (comments, trackbacks, etc) enabled, and then have the professors choose one “as is.” In addition, we will have to add quite a few articles to our help desk’s knowledge base for any “panic-mode” problems that they may encounter—for example, a link to a category will not be active until there is at least one published entry (that problem popped up twice this week).
So far, in general, the professors have liked the personal publishing aspects of Movable Type, but have been resistant to the social networking aspects such as commenting and pinging. One physics professor’s reasoning was understandable—she didn’t want to burden the students with the additional time that would be required to respond to comments and questions from people outside the university.
I am looking forward to talking with colleagues at other schools at the NMC conference this June to compare how they are dealing with supporting and promoting blogging at their schools, and to see how they are leveraging the social networking aspects of weblogs.
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