Re: [Fle3-dev] Blog with Fle3?

[Teemu Leinonen]

Rune Baggetun wrote:
> Nice idea, although you should do the integration carefully since FLE
> is build strongely on a particular model of learning that is
> different than blogs (especially if you consider giving students
> blogs).

Rune, you are right. We must be careful with this and do it "the FLE 
way". Actually, I have now thought that maybe we should not call this 
feature weblog or blog at all. Maybe we should call it "teachers' course 
announcement page"?

However, there are some really nice features in weblogs that we could 
use with the FLE's "teacher's announcement page": RSS, Archives, 
TrackBack and content tied up to time / process.

This means that this feature is not really a weblog, but an announcement 
page using some weblog techniques and formats that will make it 
compatible with weblogs.

Only the teachers of the course (role in the Fle3 courses) should hold 
rights to write to the "announcement page" - one announcement page per 
course, no commenting allowed, no student's own weblogs (in the case of 
teacher adding all students role to be a teacher in that course 
everybody can write to the announcement page).

So, if student wants to use weblogs (or she is already using one) she 
can synchronize content in it from the teacher's announcement page, 
makes links in it, etc.

> There are a lot of edublogs 'out there' writing about blogs in
> education and they mostly mention it as a tool for reflection
> (meta-cognition etc.), communication and process 'learning'. In some
> ways this is in fact similar to FLE (just my own opinion).

You are right. Weblogs are used for collaborative learning and I am sure 
that in some cases they are used very much the same way as FLE. I also 
think that it is not that important what tool you are using to do your 
job - more important is *for what* you and *how* you are using the tool.

If I think weblog as a tool for collaborative learning I see two major 
shortages: (1) No scaffolding (knowledge building), (2) no collaborative 
construction of digital artefacts (jamming).

There is a simple explanation why there are not this kind of features in 
weblog tools. They are not designed for it. As far as I know, the weblog 
tools were originally designed to be a simple tool to (1) keep log on 
things that you have found interesting in the web, and (2) for writing 
down about your daily thought - a little bit like a diary.

When doing this with a weblog one can quickly take part in "general 
discussions" in several self-organized communities online and this way 
participate in and contribute to the community.

> Another important part is that the blog is own by the student and in
> this way she/he can adapt her/his own learning space.

Yes. Exactly for this reason students' blogs are more learning diaries - 
even though you can link them to each other - than spaces of collaboration?

I think that using weblog for collaborative learning is a little bit 
like using sailing boat's navigation log book as a school exercise book. 
Of course it is possible, but...

> Useful links:

Thank you! I didn't know about these.

> COREBlog http://coreblog.org/

This looks very promising. They already have an email post feature (can 
be used with mobile phones). I think we should start working on the 
feature from these bases.

Is there anyone who knows well RSS / Traceback etc.?

Janne, would you like to study the field and lead the development?

> A Quick and Dirty Blog using Zope: 
> http://www.evolt.org/article/A_Quick_and_Dirty_Blog_using_Zope/20/23583/

This doesn't look bad either.

        - Teemu