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Showing posts from July, 2004

Our ABC Blook on Blogging

Check out the ABC Blook on Blogging , brought to you by the Wrinkles Weblog Group

British Council Bloggers

Finally, blogging has become a popular feature of British Council websites. After some previous trials, the British Council Glasgow conference for teachers (taking place this week) has four teachers blogging their observations and summaries of the presentations they attend (Sorry, but these sites are only available to British Council staff via their intranet), using typepad . This could become a regular feature of conference events - it's certainly a good way to bring the conference to those teachers who can't attend. It's true there are few comments to the posts on the weblog, but then a lot of teachers will be on holiday at the moment. I also found out that the Britsh Council community for exisitng students (Global Village, again not available to non-BC staff) is also to introduce weblogs to help improve the participation by students in this site. This is an interesting development as I proposed it when I was taking the excellent e-moderators course in September l

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts "In this study, reading performance with four white space layouts was compared. Margins surrounding the text and leading (space between lines) were manipulated to generate the four white space conditions. Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text."

trAce Online Writing Centre - Opinion

trAce Online Writing Centre - Opinion : "To call blogs literature would be to turn them into an elitist, edited, and vetted art, one which is contrary to their very nature. The complexity of what blogs and their reactionary, perfectly contemporary, accessible prose could mean to the future of sustainable storytelling, to truth in journalism and to the survival of democracy, is too great to call literature."

Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education :

Will Richardson's Power Point presentation can be found at this link: Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education The presentation provides a well-developed introduction to weblogs in education.

E-Portfolios for Learning

Helen Barrett's E-Portfolios for Learning Blog was set up to discuss "ideas on electronic portfolios to support lifelong learning"

E-portfolios and weblogging

The paper Creation of a learning landscape: weblogging and social networking in the context of e-portfolios by Ben Werdmuller of the University of Edinburgh argues that for the 'e-portfolio' system to be effective it needs to capture the enthusiam of online leraner and tutors. As learning is not a solitary pursuit, one way that this can happen is to learn from social networks such as Orkut , and weblogging communities ( livejournal being the example given). The learning experience, the paper argues, is enhanced and made more valuable by the participation and interaction of others. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | July/August 2004,Volume 39, Number 4

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | July/August 2004,Volume 39, Number 4 : "We are still working toward a common definition for electronic portfolios, or ePortfolios.1 Ideally, all work in an electronic portfolio not only is digital but also is available on the Internet. Yet even though materials may be visible on the Web, the ePortfolio is not simply a personal home page with links to examples of work. In addition, unlike a typical application program, such as word processing, an ePortfolio is a network application that provides the author with administrative functions for managing and organizing work (files) created with different applications and for controlling who can see the work and who can discuss the work (access)."

e-Literate

e-Literate is a weblog about online learning.

Results of Blog Use

I have just finished reviewing the results of a survey I gave to my students of 'Sound and Image' in the last computer class we had. The students were taking English as a subsidiary subject, as part of their Professional Studies diploma in 'Sound and Image'. A lot of these students go on to work in the world of TV, theatre, cinema, as photographers or in other audio-visual contexts when they finish their two year course. The English teachers' job is to help prepare them for this offering a mixture of general English and ESP. My class was upper-intermediate level. We had a computer class programmed every third week and I decided to introduce learner weblogs as a way for them to submit assignments and record the things we looked at in this class. As this was the first year we had regular computer room use and also the first time I had used weblogs consistently with a class, at the end of the course, I gave them a short questionnaire to see how they perceiv