a thaumaturgical compendium

I still have more to say about how blogging worked in a big class, but I figured I’d start by letting the students have a say. I asked students to reflect about what they had learned over the course of the semester, and though I didn’t ask about blogging specifically, many of them included comments about it. I have posted excerpts of most of the comments that mentioned blogging any way other than in passing.

As you can see, the majority of these are quite positive, though it reflects a few potential biases. First, final grades were not in, and so there may have been some buttering up in these self-reflections. Also, those who were more likely to comment were also more likely to be active bloggers during the semester. I’ll be interested to see how the comments here mesh with the anonymous student evals.

I’m considering putting together a survey to see if I can get at some of the non-bloggers and look at what some of the more effective ways are of getting folks up to speed quickly. Really, it took a long time for people to become comfortable with the technical aspects of blogging, and it wasn’t until the tail end of the course that most folks were really getting into it, I think. By then, a significant portion of the class had bailed. This might just be the case for any sort of online course that requires weekly participation–but without asking, I won’t know.

With a few exceptions (like the first one), these are excerpted from the original posting, which generally had less to do with blogging and more to do with the material of the course as a whole. Click through if you are interested in more context.

This is a long collection of comments; click on “more” to browse through them.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of the semester I wrote a little about the technical issues of aggregating content for the nearly-400 person class I’m teaching. I finally solved the problem (mostly) by using a copy of Gregarious. (That aggregator is set up here.) I’ll write shortly about how I think that the big blogging course worked out pedagogically, but first a quick technical note.

Wordpress.com is the best of blog hosts, and it is the worst of blog hosts. On the best side, it gives you a lot to play with, neat bells and whistles, and a great deal of control over your look. It does this all for free: really free, not ad supported free. However, putting it to a stress test, requiring that students each set up a blog on the host, revealed a few cracks. (In practice, I only required that people have a blog set up on an RSS/Atom capable blog host–but those are fewer than you might first imagine!)

Set up & Login

First, setup was far from intuitive. I’ve had students play with Blogger before, and their set-up is still much easier to understand for many students, I think. I have a feeling the same is true of Livejournal (”liverjournal,” as one of my collaborators manages to malaprop consistently). Obviously, “Site Admin” is not that hard to understand, but it takes some getting used to. Most students end up bookmarking the “wp-admin” url so that they can find it. This is especially true when they are used to the idea of the aggregator being the end publication of their blog. Most didn’t even think about their non-aggregated version.

Reliability

More troubling is that Wordpress.com seems to have had some crashes and periodic slowdowns. Of course, it is hard to blame them for this; in some ways it is probably natural growing pains. But the emphasis there is on the “pain.” Receiving fifty emails from students because they are down just before a deadline is not fun. I decided to go with wordpress.com rather than my own host to increase responsiveness and reliability, and while it saved me time, I’m not sure it really led to more reliable service.

What now?

Well, now that I’ve decided not to continue to support my own blogging server (except for the legacies), I guess I’ll have to stick with Wordpress.com and try to build a set of materials to help students make better use of it. Alternatively, I might give Edublogs a run, though I’m not sure James is ready for a few hundred bloggers concurrently hitting the site. I may be back to Blogger. I’ll probably also be pushing for more team blogging, especially in smaller classes, with four people on the same site.

I do want to pick one and go with it, because whatever the platform, it needs more documentation, at the most basic level. As I will discuss in a later posting, when students succeeded with blogging it was very, very good, but when they did not it was horrid.

I’ve just finished going through nearly 300 blogs, and my eyes feel like they are about to fall out of my head. (Thanks go to the inestimable help of Brenda, who took on 100 of these.) I’ll write a bit more about this later. First, I was crazy to ask a 400 person class to blog. If I ever teach another course this large, it’s multiple guess all the way.

Second, about half the students really seem to be getting it, and the posts seem to be measurably improving for these students. About half have completely dropped out of blogging–effectively dropped out of completing the class, it seems. That failure rate is unacceptable, but I’m not sure what to do about it. Part of it is that students are unaccustomed to having something due each week, especially in an online course. Part is that they are not comfortable writing, I fear. But a lot has to do with the strangeness of getting used to blogging.

WordPress.com has just added some stats, and a few students have been energized by the idea that their writing is finding an audience. Way2Much has this to say (and sorry for copying the full post here):

It is a beautiful day and I am inside playing on my computer - there is something very wrong with this.

I read AJ’s excitement that he has outside comments to his blog. I have had ONE and that has caused me some excitement as well. So I understand his enthusiasm!

I also noticed today that Wordpress keeps track of your traffic. I am excited and disappointed at the same time. I only found this out today, checked it out, and was thrilled to see that I had a lot of traffic Mid-March. Unfortunately, I have very few in April, Personal goal: get that traffic flowing!

NO THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PORN - BUT IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH BLOGGING FOR CLASS! For those that have no idea what I am talking about, if you look at your dashboard, there is STATS right next to it on the right. Click on that and you have all that information right at your fingertips. I am also trying to change my categories from uncategorized to others such as obscenity, literature, etc to see if that attracts more attention to my posts. (Better late than never!)

Happy Blogging!

If you have a chance, cruise on over to the class aggregator and see if there is an interesting post to comment on.

Just flew into town and boy does my back hurt. Wait, I don’t know if I got that right.

The Washington Post is running a few short articles on edublogging: an overview titled Blackboard Blogging, an article about the illustrious Will Richardson, a sidebar from Jessica, who is helping me out this semester, and an interviewlet with me.

UPDATE: zefrank makes fun of Jessica’s piece in his “das truth” (mov). She’s taking it hard, but I think it’s pretty damn funny. Nobody makes fun of me. I am chronically underlampooned, for no discernable reason, since I seem to be such an obvious target.

I started out the semester planning on using my own blogging server for my 360-person class. The advantage was simple: I had set it up so that when students set up a blog, it was automatically included on a lilina-based aggregator. I had used the lilina aggregator in earlier, smaller classes, and liked its combination of “river of news” presentation (in which entries are listed in chronological order, no matter what their source), and the ability to hide or reveal entry text using a javascript link on the page. Great stuff.

Then I realized that my poor ISP would drown under 400 new blogs, and decided to outsource. I recommended my students set up on Wordpress.com, though some have opted for Livejournal or Blogger. I then set up a page that would allow people to add themselves to the lilina feeds.

This seems easy, but given most of the students had never blogged before, understanding what an aggregator is, or what the URL for their blog is, let alone the URL for their feed, was asking way too much. Even more than a month in, I have a feeling many students have a shaky idea of what these things are.

Fairly early on, it became clear that lilina wasn’t going to be able to handle the load. The problem was that it was set up with a kind of cheap cron: it cached the page for an hour, but if you were the unlucky visitor who showed up after that hour, you would have to wait twenty minutes or more while it went out and checked feeds. What a mess. As a result, it wasn’t being updated, or was timing out when trying to get feeds, and students were panicking because they didn’t know if their blogs could be read. Yes, I could have scheduled an update in the normal way, but my (insert not-so-nice word here) ISP for the site only provided cron jobs that could be executed once every 24-hours. Bad news.

So, I figured, no problem: we’ll move to Bloglines, my favored reader. Nice idea, but with 400 feeds, it remains slow. Moreover, students were now used to the river-of-news style (rather than the folder style), and had trouble figuring out that Bloglines could offer that, too. Now we were two strikes down.

I spent a mad few days trying out every possible combination of web-based aggregators and a number of server aggregators. Maybe I could use a service that would blend all the feeds into one, something like Feedblendr. Nice idea, but didn’t update frequently enough. I worked my way through the list of aggregators on Wikipedia, feeling a bit like the three bears. This one had an intuitive interface, but no way of making it public. Another one was set up for public aggregating, but presented the feeds as folders rather than as a River of News. BlogDigger looked just about perfect, but didn’t seem to actually work.

In the end, I installed Gregarious on a new server (where I could do a 20 minute cron job to keep everything up to date). It’s been working well. There is the small issue of the read/unread items, which doesn’t translate well to a public aggregator, but otherwise it is quick, and fairly intuitive.

Some of the postings so far this semester are outstanding, some are pretty atrocious. With this big a class, my ability to improve the writing of the majority is pretty limited. My push over the next few weeks is to highlight some of the more common grammatical errors, in hopes that we can at least limit these a bit more. I’m also going to put up a tutorial on how to get started on Google Reader, so that students can import the OPML from our aggregator and personalize it on their own private reader.

Week before classes start. Everybody wants everything, now. I’m still working on things that needed to be done in 2005. And so, my blog server dies. No, not this one, the one that I set up for the students. And early next week, 400 students in my class, and many others in other classes are going to need it working. No problem, it was an easy fix: my account ran out of disk space. But it was the last straw. I am (very, slowly) getting out of the blog-server business.

I set up the server initially as a bit of an experiment. Thanks to some funding from the Educational Technology Center on campus, I made the system a bit more robust, and user friendly. I’ve been keeping it up, and updating to new versions, and finally have the spam monkey mostly off our backs. However, the piece of the proposal that was not funded by ETC–a new server–is finally biting us. I figured that some good successes would ensure future funding for servers and support, but that seems unlikely now.

At the same time, some of the reasons I wanted our own system are now less compelling. This is particularly true now that wordpress.com offers free wordpress hosting. For the cyberporn course, this semester, I am pointing students toward weblogs.com, and then aggregating their posts centrally.

Trebor Scholtz is still using the schoolof server for his course, Technologies for Creative Collaborations, and it seems to be doing OK with Christopher Harris’s very popular infomancy blog, as well as several other active blogs. So, I will keep the server around as it is indefinitely. Or, perhaps I should offer some of the more power-users sublets on my webspace so that they can do what they like with it–with some collective work it could be made into something very solid. But then edublogs already provides much in this direction, I guess.

In the meantime, I’ve put together a quick screencast (SWF, ~6 Mb), walking absolute beginners through signing up for a blog at wordpress.com. More to come on this, as I do a quick weekend switch in blogging strategies for the huge cyberporn class. (Textbooks for that class are still AWOL as well. And I always thought of Friday the 13th as an especially lucky day for me.)

Interesting brief article in Queue on IBM’s Dogear social bookmarking tool for the enterprise. It appears to be a system like del.icio.us, but with the ability to assign groups and to set up levels of privacy.

They skip over the most interesting and difficult part: How to get folks to use it! They casually mention that they built RSS right into the system, as if that was an immediate sell. I think it could be used to great effect in classes and in academic meetings, but it seems to have had a lukewarm reception in these venues.

In particular, the Association of Internet Researchers meeting encouraged tagging for the conference. First off: not sure that an academic conference encourages tagging. It seems to me to be something that has to happen over a long period of time. Second, they gave folks too many options: suggesting del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr tags, to an audience among whom (ironically, I think) tagging is not a common practice. In all, the effort fell flat. But it had the standard “let’s do it and see what happens” vibe. Nothing wrong with that vibe — it is very Web 2.0 — but as I said, the value of tagging something for a fairly broad conference seems limited to me, especially (and this is key!) if it isn’t integrated into the whole.

I’ve also had my classes tagging this semester. Since the class “home page” is an aggregator (like this one) it’s easy to pull the RSS from del.icio.us and integrate it with the standard stream. Yet only those who already knew about tagging are tagging.

I’m now thinking about the Cyberporn and Society course for next semester (yes, it is a little late), and how to better integrate tagging into the course. I think an important step is to provide more of an overview of what tagging is all about and how to do it so that students have a better idea of what it is.

It is always a trade-off in a course: how much time do you spend talking about blogging/wikis/bookmarking/etc. and how much time do you spend with the actual substance of the course. In other words, what is the ROI (return on instruction) for focusing on the “ways of doing” rather than the “ways of knowing.” I have generally shied away from “teaching the tools.” Set up some expectations for product — I always thought — and students would teach themselves the tools.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering this a bit. It’s a truism that we are never teaching, but hoping our students learn to learn. It strikes me that certain kinds of tools (how to use a library, for instance) have a very high long-term ROI. While my “don’t teach the tools” made sense when we were dealing with Flash or GoLive (v.1, yikes!), when it comes to social computing, it may be something worth really focusing time and resources on.

Sure, some of you may say “duh”! But that’s a bit of a new direction for me.