About half way

After revisiting my goal and objectives for this course, as well as the specific activities, using this time as a formative assessment, several points have come to my attention. Perhaps in my balance of allowing students to guide the direction of the class and dictating the direction myself, I have leaned too far to the former. The loose structure has frustrated some.

One of the observations of this class is that because the class is quite large (in the past I've had about 6 students) more students have adventured into advanced features more quickly then anticipated. Perhaps it's just a great class of students, and I think it is. The plan was that about now we would be adding movies, and images, and links to other sites. Then we would add resources and upgrade our gadgets and try the RSS feature. Some of you have done all of these and blogged about them. Hopefully others will be able to do this soon and benefit from their classmates' discoveries.

So there are three activities that I expect us to do before we end the class with a personal but professional reflection of the value of blogs in education.

One of the bigger questions that remains is how do I manage my blog, the blogs of my students or peers if I use my blog in that way, and the blogs of other persons, both professional and personal, so that I receive the information I want but not overwhelm myself. In other words, the management part of this process. Compare ideas on your blogs and experience with some of your ideas, culminating with a blog describing your management plan.

Next there is a question of how do I promote my blog so that I'm not just writing to myself and so that I can get feedback from others. Discuss this in your blogs, do research from journals and on the Internet, and finally design and write your marketing plan in a blog.

Lastly, write a summary, a reflection of what you have learned about blogging, particularly in education, and how you might use blogs, or why you might not. I encourage you to complete this process by the end of January. I will continue to encourage and add resources for these last blogs.

I expect that by the time you have resolved all these issues from your first introductory blog to your final reflection you should have posted some dozen or more blog entries and commented on many, many more.

Watch for me on Friday.