PhD blog

I've decided to try and keep a blog of thoughts and so on as I set out on the long road to a PhD... I chose Wordpress as several friends were using it and the features seem about right for what I want...

Using Weblog at NTU

Hi Guys
First posting to here. I have been using a Weblog with my dissertation students since start of term. Trying out some various uses in this area so have a look and comment if you wish. Happy to discuss some of the issues I have found already. These are all mature students, some with technophobia but most are willing to engage. Discovered some nice suprises and benefits as well.

www.keystoneproject.net

love
Dave

Testing with Live Journal

OK, So we've (Helen Boulton & Jane McNeil) have launched LiveJournal on NTU students as of the last couple of days. LiveJournal seemed to meet the needs of the module giving closed blogs visible only to 'friends'. Hopefully in the next few days/weeks there'll feedback on the understanding of the process and usefulness of blogging as a way of keeping an online journal. I'll keep you informed when we know more. If not give myself or Phil Pierce a prod.

Success with LiveJournal

Hello Fellow Bloggers,

We have made some progress with the situation described in a previous post, where my semi-anonymous friend "Jane" wanted to create a series of private blogs for her students (for the sake of argument, history students). We have tried out LiveJournal, and it seems to meet our needs. There are options to make your own blogg completely private, or to open it up to certain individuals or groups, or to go public. We have tested this with three dummy accounts, and it seems to work exactly as we want.

So, we are going to try setting up accounts for students (80+!) before the start of term, and assign each of them around four friends. These friends will then form small discussion groups where students can only see, and comment on each others blogs within these groups. They will also have the opportunity to add other friends later on, from other groups if they want.

Might this be of interest to anyone else? Does anyone have any comments - particularly about any potential pitfalls I may not have seen?

Phil

Blogs and discussion areas

I found this site http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000768.html which gives a really helpful table about the difference between blogs and message boards, which I roughly translate as discussion areas.

I've been thinking this week about the community piano in Sheffield. And then about the successful community whiteboard (yes, a tangible solid object) in Lionel Robbins, trying to see how they relate to a successful educational blog. But I guess, from the commoncraft site, they are clearly discussion areas, though there are areas of overlap with blogs.

Incidentally, there's an intersesting review of Wiki: web collaboration on page 21 of the THES this week. At £38.50 I think I will ask the Library to buy it.

Edu-blogging - technicalities and controversies

Fellow bloggers,

I have this erm... friend - we'll call her "Jane", who feels blogging would be a very suitable teaching tool for one of her classes. However, owing to the nature of the classes (for the sake of argument, an example could be discussion of the holocaust, including such extremely controvertial ideas like "did it happen") it would be desirable to prevent it from being viewable by anyone.

This would enable students to discuss freely, without causing offence to the public and not feeling unduly inhibited from exploring and expressing their ideas. As far as I can see, on most blogging software it is only possible to restrict who can comment, not who can view. Does anyone happen to know if there is a blogging service equivalent to Blogger where this is possible? The idea would be to set up groups of "friends" who can view and / or comment, including the tutor "Jane" and other students.

I have tried using the Webboard based blog software with this in mind, but got suckered into looking like a prat from the start. AFTER you have posted to the blog, you can see every post made by everyone to that "blog" (ie conference). So my first random test post, which seemed to me to be part of a new, private blog, was actually part of a fairly public blog that already existed that I simply couldn't see until it was too late. It's not a very user-friendly interface IMHO. A bit more controversy there.

So does anyone know of a free commercial service that fits the bill? Or would indeed the WebBoard version do the job?

Phil

PS - nothing against any Aston Martin owners amongst us...

Weblogs: supporting research through integration

Like Bob's friend Stephen Powell I have a Weblog/online-journal that I use as part of my PhD research. I find it very useful for collecting citations and examples of design practice. And because I built the tool myself I was able to experiment with the form a bit. My Weblog Constellations combines both Weblog and Wiki-like features: posts are listed in reverse chronological order (like a Weblog); as well as being clustered with related posts (like a Wiki).
Another aspect that I find useful is a page that lists posts according to their viewed frequency (calculated through combining the total quantity of viewings and the relative recentness of each post being viewed): Constellations: What's Popular. I find this aspect personally useful for helping me identify viewing trends.