Moodle in English: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Wednesday, 13 July 2005, 10:08 PM

OK, this is going to be a very important discussion. Please read this closely (sorry it's long) and try to stay on topic.

Some background

Daryl has done a lot of work on Blogs and I thought it was going to be easy to integrate into Moodle 1.6. However, when it came time to do it, I found a big conceptual problem lurking.

Quite a lot of things in Moodle are actually just posts. Forums posts, glossary entries, messages, comments, feedback, and more. (In fact Moodle will be evolving to store all of these in one central data table, but this is another issue for another discussion.)

Now we are going to be adding another type of post, the Blog entry, which will have comments from teachers and optionally students. When a user makes a blog entry, they can choose the audience for it: it can be private, for teachers, for their group, for the class, for the site or for the world. They can also choose categories for it (like metadata), either chosen from existing ones from ones they make up. We could experiment with folksonomies etc.

The problem

Really a blog is just a private forum, where only you can start the conversations, but others can reply (if you let them). In that light, go here and see the conversations you have started: really it's nearly a blog already, right?

So the problem is: if you have forums and a blog, which will you use to post to when you have something to say to others? Do you post in a forum where you think people might read it, or do you post in your blog and try and draw readers to you? What is the deciding factor? What is the difference?

I have a strong suspicion we will have the same kind of content spread over both. Imagine this site for example ... we will have people posting in forums commenting on blogs, and people posting in forums commenting on blogs. People will "hijack" discussions in one place and bring the discussion to other places. It all becomes rather a mishmash - which do you read? Which do you follow? Forums can be bad enough already. How do we as learners keep track of all these connections across different parts of Moodle?

Will all this end up being confusing for users? I have a strong feeling that it will unless we can really deal with this properly in a way that hasn't been done by any other system I've seen.

What we need to do

We need to think very deeply about forums, blogs and the other types of posts Moodle allows to come up with a unified idea that is so simple that anyone can understand it straight away (these are the hardest ideas to think of).

Daryl and I had a great discussion over a foosball table (not long enough) in Massachusetts last month but the best we could come up with was to remove the comments from blogs and extend the blog trackback system to keep track of links between blogs and between blogs and forums etc.

I'm not sure this is quite the simplicity I was hoping for. I'm not sure people will understand what all this is for and how to use it.

The call

I need some feedback on this from the thinkers and dreamers among you, some fresh ideas, some sort of way of looking at this that is different.

Please join in and help us come up with a bold clear plan to bring blogs into Moodle in a way that improves the overall experience and doesn't make things confusing.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by W Page - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 12:43 AM

Hi Martin!

I just want to express my disappointment as to the direction the MoodleBlog is about the take.

I have followed the development of the MoodleBlog from the time it was just an idea to when it was grated forum status. I recently visited Daryl's and Dan's Development/Demo site. I was so happy to see all the work that they had done. The layout was just great with many nice features:

HomePage blog
Course blog format
Ability to have different themes for different blogs
RSS feeds for the blog
ETC......

There was also a positive early off-shoot of their blog work and that was the HTML Block which from all indications appears to be a big success.

I do not understand why there cannot be options here to either use the Blogs or Forums as they are depending on what the site Admin or Teacher/Course Creator intends to do educationally wise, Site-wide or Course-wide. thoughtful They are really not in competition with each other. Each brings their own flavor to the meal.

WP1

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 12:59 AM

WP, relax, there will still be a blog and it will still have all those things, but it will be better integrated with Moodle. I don't think you read or understood what I wrote above - I am attempting to prevent a potentially huge usability problem before it happens.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Sue Clemes - Friday, 3 August 2007, 8:24 AM

Hi,

In the short term, until the Moodle Blog is completed, would it be possible to make one of the options of a forum a Single user forum? A single user forum would give each individual student their own forum with the option to make them visible or separate depending on the requirement of the teacher. This way students could post text, images, video and link to documents. This wouldn't encompass all of the options described earlier but it would be a short-term blog-like solution. I would assume most of the code to do this already exists within Moodle.

Sue

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by N Hansen - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 4:18 AM

My personal impression of the general difference between a blog and a forum is that a forum is more of a level playing ground. Sure there is one person who starts a thread but their original post is more or less equal with others who participate in the thread. It generally is a back and forth interaction and after a while one forgets who started the thread-it is the topic at hand that is important.

A blog gives a person an air of authority on what they are talking about because they are the only one who can post something original, and in the sense that one can only comment on what the blogger says. Very few bloggers bother to engage in conversation with the people who comment on their original post. They usually just post and move on to another topic without engaging readers in a discussion. Right now, the closest thing to a blog in Moodle is the glossary with comments turned on or the each person can start a thread option in the forums or whatever it is called.

I am not a big fan of blogs, partially for the reasons I have outlined abve, and to a great extent that because I think that most are not particularly well-done. If a blog gives one person an air of authority, then they should have something authoritative to say. But most blogs consist of either trivial discussion about what one did today, or it consists of many links to other Web sites, which in itself doesn't lend itself to comments. It is rare to see a blog with original content of more than trivial interest.

That's just some preliminary thoughts on the matter.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Darren Smith - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 6:01 AM

Im with Nicole on this one. I must admit I dont really understand all the fuss about blogs. They just seem self indulgent to me. They have very little value (especially educational) compared to the input required to maintain them and they can very quickly become dated and laborious. The only people who tend to read them are the authors themselves. Sure there are some popular, well written ones but there are substantially more badly written abandoned ones.

In a few years I think people will look at blogs the way we now look at 3 page personal black-background websites on fortunecity it seemed like a good idea at the time!

I think if something like this is to be introduced then firstly, as Martin identified, it needs to be linked to the profile page rather than a course (otherwise it would just be a journal, right?).

Secondly, how about the ability to send (or actually link) forum posts to you profile page / blog. I know they are at the moment but there is no mechanism to just highlight your faves.

This could be used for 3^rd party developers who want a central place for all of their attached code which often gets lost in the forums.

Students could use this to turn their profile page into an e-portfolio of forum posts / teacher feedback / example work / whatever.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by N Hansen - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 8:12 AM

Another difference between blogs and forums is the time nature. Blogs tend to be very time sensitive. The relevancy of their content usually decreases over time. I'm not going to care in 2 years what you had for dinner on July 13, 2005, nor is a collection of outdated links to news Web sites covering the London bombings going to be of much use to me either. Whereas information in a forum tends to have a more lasting value than the content of blogs.

I do have some ideas about an alternative that would in some ways combine the concepts of resources, blogs and a student portfolio all into one module. I've got to finish making dinner at the moment though so it will have to wait for later. And I won't bother telling you what I am cooking because today or tomorrow, I don't think you will really care. wink

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 8:21 PM

Please don't just think of blogs you may have seen on the Internet. The possibilities for Blogs in Moodle are different, because:

it's a closed environment
it's an educational environment
deep reflective writing can be a powerful educational tool when done right

Many people do in fact treat their public blog like this, but in Moodle we need to actively promote this kind of use.

We can also combine entries to create group blogs, class blogs etc.

I highly recommend trying out this demo site which has blogs to try and get a feel for what Daryl (and Dan) have so far.

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回應: Re: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Chiu Charlie - Thursday, 8 September 2005, 4:45 PM

For my knowledge, reflective thing is very improtant in the learning process. My thinking is:
1. blog in Moodel should not like general blog out there for the personal log
2. to related to education/learning, the blog entry can/should linked with the course resources/activities to regrarding for personal/group reflecting to the resource/activities.
3. The commenting, grading, and reverse linking can be perserved for teacher to direct or/and to encourage the entry.
4. I like the idea of protfolio, maybe it can be used to automatically linked to personal learning logs (with multiple label to regarding course/activity type..etc, such as google to mail item).

Of course, I just read to this thread for a few. If it echo to other's idea, just count this a a vote for it.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Mark Berthelemy - Friday, 15 July 2005, 1:43 AM

Hi Darren,

You make a very important point here about blogs: "The only people who tend to read them are the authors themselves."

That's exactly how I treat my blog and explain them to others - they're not so much a communication tool - but more of a personal knowledgebase that other people can read if you let them. (Blog software that allows categorisations of postings is particularly useful in this regard). In fact that's exactly how Elgg treats blogs - more as a portfolio that you can then share. Mixing ideas from Elgg into Moodle would be so powerful...

If you treat blogs in this way, then there is no (or minimal) usability issue between blogs and forums - it's more a matter of saying to oneself: "Is this for me? Or is it for others?" A bit like the difference between using forums and using email.

Yes, there's always the potential for confusion if you don't give enough scaffolding around the tools (that's why all my Moodle courses have a label underneath every element (forum, resource, glossary etc) to explain what they going to get when they click on that link).

I know that goes against how many people use blogs (including those I read regularly) - but it might help our thinking here.

Mark

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 2:04 AM

I found this post helpful, thanks Mark.

If we really de-emphasise the "publication" nature of the Blogs and emphasise the portfolio aspect (this is a record of my learning journey) then that might just do it.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by N Hansen - Friday, 15 July 2005, 4:53 AM

Martin-The portfolio aspect is precisely the aspect I don't really like, whereas the publication aspect is particularly appealing to me.

I mean have you considered the reason nobody but the authors read blogs is because they don't make for very good reading? I mean, if those people really intended the blog for no one but themselves then why don't they just open up a document on their own computer and record their thoughts there?

While I believe most blogs are pretty much like portfolios in that they aren't really polished work, who is to say we shouldn't use a blogging type mechanism as a means of allowing students to prepare "publishable" material? Maybe I feel this way because my grad school department has a very subtle but definite push that we aren't here simply to fill our heads with knowledge, but to become producers of knowledge ourselves. It doens't matter how smart we are, if we aren't producing anything then we haven't really done what we are supposed to be doing with ourselves.

Now, you know that I am going to be teaching courses that have as their primary purpose giving the general public a way of filling their heads with knowledge, so it might seem like I would be in favor of the portfolio concept, but I'm not. I also think that it would be nice to give those same people a way of feeling they are contributing something as well. I get the sense a lot of people would very much appreciate it if their voice were also appreciated and recognized.

The way I would like to use the blogging mechanism is not so much to have students just jot down a bunch of thoughts for the week, but as a way for them to create and produce an end product that they could take pride in. I would particularly like to use something like this in a blended learning experience where my students would travel to Egypt, and at least a day or two of their time would be spent pursuing individual research projects of their own, which they could later present online. What I would like to see is a mechanism that would allow them first to create a resource-like page (or the multipage resource that will be coming in the future to Moodle) that only they and the teacher could see at first. Later, once the teacher and the student had agreed on it, it could be made accessible to the entire class, who could comment on it, as one would do in a blog. After that course was over, the project could be made accessible even to the whole world.

And come on, let's get realistic, who on earth has ever kept some sort of paper "record of my learning journey"? Do you really think people care about that sort of thing? It's the knowledge they acquired that will be important to people in the long run, not how they got it. Honestly, the concept sounds a bit silly to me, but maybe that is just my own opinion.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 2:17 PM

> who on earth has ever kept some sort of paper "record of my learning journey"?

All the people who keep diaries? It really is a good way to learn about yourself, Nicole, you should try it!

I think what you're talking about is actually best served by a Wiki.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Don Hinkelman - Friday, 15 July 2005, 8:52 PM

Personal learning diaries are a hot topic at second language learning conferences. There are even learner-autonomy special interest groups that focus on tools and strategies for students to manage their own learning. I have used a learning journal in my classes on several occasions, but am not up-to-date on what people are publishing on this. This is what I tried to do with 20 year old beginner students in EFL at a university in Japan:

had students keep a notebook just for my class
they are assigned to write a long paragraph once a week about their reflections on the class (50 to 200 words depending on their level)
I give them a template of three points to answer (amongst some of these questions)
- what was most interesting about class?
- what new words or phrases did you learn?
- how much English did you use?
- when did you use English? when switch back to Japanese?
- how is your project going?
- what do you want to differently next class?
occasionally we share notebooks, pass them around and discuss in their first language
occasionally I read the notebooks and make a comment on their struggles (no grade and no correcting English)
at the end of a term, I collect them and give them a simple grade according the amount of writing they did

It would be good to hear how others do learning diaries because I certainly have not polished this procedure. Also, I gave it up because it was too tedious to handle. Although its a good activity, if classmates and myself can't give good feedback, I don't believe I should force an activity and it will lose energy. If a learning diary can be done outside of valuable class time and if it can have good feedback (not just comments, but ratings and checkboxes) from a variety of people, then I really look forward to trying these journals again. Also, I believe doing this online will remove the tedious paper handling/commenting.

For writing classes, we do intensive free-writing journals every day. But that is a different process altogether.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by W Page - Friday, 15 July 2005, 10:12 PM

Hi Don!

I have made a decision to lurk on this discussion for a while before commenting again. However, after reading your post, I wanted to say that this approach, that is the weekly paragraph, to learning is definitely an interesting one and one that would encourage grammar and vocabulary building. I would suggest that corrections be done however, just to strengthen the language building. I agree with you about no grades for each entry and a summary grade at the end for completing the assignment.

Gave me an idea relating to science where with high school students there is also a need for vocabulary building and the strengthening of grammar. Something called "Science Literacy".

Back to lurking.

WP1

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by N Hansen - Friday, 15 July 2005, 10:03 PM

All the people who keep diaries? It really is a good way to learn about yourself, Nicole, you should try it!

I think what you're talking about is actually best served by a Wiki.

I'm not running a self-help group for people to learn about themselves...

I disagree, I think what you are thinking about would be best served by a wiki. Isn't one of the fundamental things about a wiki is that it allows you to see how something has evolved? I'm interested in the end product, not how it got to be the end product. A wiki would just save a lot of extraneous information I am not interested in. Even though I've worked as an editor so I have experience in the process of getting from one point to another, ultimately my goal was to produce something good, not reveal the less than good aspects that got there.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 10:55 PM

Well, you don't have to look at the Wiki history, it's just a tool that makes it easy to publish to publish web pages. From what you're saying though, maybe your students would best work in their own computer and just upload to an assignment when they're done?

Anyhow, this is getting offtopic (ie discussions).

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by N Hansen - Saturday, 16 July 2005, 12:24 AM

I like the idea of a module where the student could actually use the html editor to prepare something, they could save it in progress, come back later and work on it, but ultimately it could be shared with the teacher, the class or the world. Kind of like the assignment module with sharing of the assignments (perhaps I should submit a feature request for this?). The blog sounds a lot like it could do this too, but my concern with the blog is mainly its free topic nature (students being alloweed to post on anything and everything whenever they want) and its chronological nature. I would rather have something that allowed me to assign a specific assignment (either with an assigned topic or a topic chosen by the student) that could later be shared.

And without the HTML editor integrated, a wiki is useless to me actually. The technical nature of my site will really require students use it.

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It's a matter of genre

by Mark Nichols - Wednesday, 12 October 2005, 4:27 AM

An excellent discussion, sorry to be so late in it!

I think that the differences between blog and discussion forum posts are a matter of genre, just as we write personal letters differently from formal reports and expect different forms of style and content in each. Blog posts are personal musings, an expression of one's attitudes and observations. Discussion forum entries are more conversational and intentional.

In a discussion forum such as this the accepted genre is that it is a place where you should respectfully provide your point of view to a subscribed community; in a blog you are somewhat freer to ramble based on your own musings. A discussion forum is public/community; a blog is private/community.

I think the term 'genre' has a great deal to contribute to the discussion. I found an interesting article on the concept of genres here. Blogs permit a style of thinking and commmunication that is different to that of the discussion forum genre, and so the two should be seen as complementary.

Cheers,

Mark.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Darren Smith - Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 7:10 PM

A-hem. I think I am about to retract some of my comments surprise

I have been playing with a blog recently and ... ummm .... well, they are very addictive aren't they? blush

Firstly, I stand by everything I wrote from "I think if something like this is to be introduced then firstly ....". In fact, I stand by a lot of that stronger than I did before. The problem was I think my impression of blogs was wrong. They *are* for the writer and not the reader and this has substantial educational value.

Take this using moodle course. I have been active in here since Jan 04 and in that time I have learned a lot. I have passed on a lot of what I have learned in here and on my own to other moodlers in order to pay something back. In that time I have had no real opportunity to be reflective. If I did post a substantial, well thought out reflective entry then, as it would be personal, there would be a good chance that nobody may reply and how would that make me feel!

Now, encouraging students to do something like this could be a problem and this is where moodle should come in.

Some students may see this as more work rather than a contribution to their learning process. Others may feel self-conscious about sharing their inner thoughts in an area where other can see it (and if it is private then they may feel 'what is the point').

On the flip side, meta-data must also be embraced in blogs to support those wishing to make public posts that contribute to collective learning. That way bloggers could have sections which reflect their experiences with, in this case, moodle, which are not requests for help so don't belong in the forums (problems experienced setting moodle up, good teaching ideas, whatever) which could come up in site searches and therefore support other people's learning for more than a sticky forum post.

Thanks for reading

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Steve Hyndman - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 7:50 AM

I think blogs have been very successful, better than anything else I can think of, at putting the "power of the web" in the hands of "non-techies". For that reason alone, I think they are excellent web tools and are here to stay. People are starting to use blog systems for a lot more than just blogging...check this out. I think, like anything else on the web, there are a lot of great and not-so-great blogs out there.

There are lots of examples of people using blogs as an easy way to build and manage a website...like the example above. I have several examples of very good uses of blogs (although they are being used a little different from typical blogs)...another example is a student in one of my recent educational technology classes who had never built a webpage (and probably would have never built a webpage using a more "traditional" method), but with about 2 hours of training he started a blog for his classes and has been making very good use of it for over six months now.

I agree that most blogs are not particularly well done...but then again, most websites, discussion boards, and even a few Moodle sites are not particularly well done either .

Having said that, I have been thinking about blogs and Moodle (and blogs in Moodle) for some time now and I've come to the conclusion (opinion) that they are very different systems and I'm not sure there is a real benefit in trying to integrate them. If it happens, I may find a use for a blog in Moodle...not sure.

I have been considering for some time now, using a blog application (WordPress) as a replacement for our current student eportfolio system. I was also considering waiting for the blog in Moodle to get fully developed and use it, but a couple of weeks ago, I changed direction and decided to customize Moodle a bit and use it for the eportfolio...it has everything needed. In fact, the real problem is that Moodle has "too much" for an eportfolio system. So, for the past couple of weeks I've been customizing a Moodle install a bit (a course for each student with a lot of the blocks, activities, administration, and settings removed) and plan to offer it to over 200 new teacher education students this fall for their eportfolio as well as over 2,000 current users of our FrontPage system. I had been working for months to try and develop this in a blog, but after talking with some people at the NE Moodle Moot and thinking about it more, I finally woke up one day a couple of weeks ago and thought "okay, why not just use Moodle?". If anyone would like to see what the teacher sees in their eportfolio, send me an email or a private message and I'll send you a teacher login to a sample.

Blogs....content management systems....learning management systems....three different things that I'm not sure needs to become one. But then again, I could be wrong mixed

Steve

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Don Hinkelman - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 9:45 AM

Messiness in the evolution of tools is natural. It is actually a good thing as we sort out the difference of forums, blogs, and other forms of discussion. However, I caution us to avoid looking at past forms. The blogs we see/hate/love on the web are not the blog of the future we are talking about here. The forum we see now in Moodle is not the forum of the future. Martin is asking us to step back from the tweeking of features/code to find a simpler clarity on the newness we are trying to achieve. Here are some imaginings from one crystal ball...

Major Discussion/Publication Tools

portfolio: a collection of all the works of a person **on one page**. (Actually, not the full works, but links to full works arranged in an attractive way). This is really what I see us trying to achieve with the current "blog" initiative. This single-page collection has a feature of **selectable publication**, something not in any Moodle tool now. A learner/teacher can select which parts of the portfolio can be published **to the world** as well to the group/course/site. A "to-the-world" option allows unenrolled people to view coursework, and they absolutely need a way to annotate/comment without entering the Moodle course-world. When my Japanese students do web-site building projects, and publish those for their Korean-sister school classmates to read, we want lots of comments without having to have them login or enroll to my class. Finally, the portfolio (or portions of it) can be configured as an **all-in-one-my-website** that moves from course-to-course throughout the school curriculum and may later move to an alumni place after graduation (instead of erasure and total unenrollment).
forums: forums as we have now will evolve into a multiplicity of forms, but with a serial discussion core, and an anyone-can-start-one format. The portfolio is my work/my group's work and in that sense it is not open in the way a forum is open and therefore is group/course-owned. A portfolio is personally owned (in principle). The new forms of forum would include a sticky-forum, a wiki-forum, a poll-forum, among others. LAMS is already moving to create these combined-tool-activities. Moodle will follow when we have the time and resources. Finally, when we have more definable roles, we optionally set up moderated forums to build summarizing roles into collaborative writing/planning projects.
journals: this is like diary-writing--not the old Journal Module. It includes personal musings and photos and "writing for my own clarity" exercises. It is one part of the portfolio. It is traditional blogging, but I really want to avoid that word for now. Simple and optional commenting and rating, not discussion is good here.
profile: this is different than a journal. It is my self-descriptions and self-assessments and ways to contact me that I set up. It is an indirect invitation to dialogue, with links and pathways to begin that dialogue.

Minor Discussion Toolets

annotations: an annotation toolet will allow a learning designer to attach commenting anywhere in learning process. It is very simple, not a threaded forum, just a very small print listing of comments by readers in one window.
trackbacks: actually I don't know what this is, but they sound cool.
block keywords: another way to annotate a posting or learning publication is to attach a keyword. The keyword is a "block title" which would send a link, which would be published in a block set up in another part of the course site, or inside another person's portfolio. These link-blocks would pull-push learners back and forth across a site.
ratings: peer, mentor and teacher ratings are not a discussion, but when published in block listings (e.g. My Best Rated Essays, This Week's Favorite Projects), they can pull people into a discussion. In fact, block keywords/ratings and other blocks could pull people into a MyForum section of the portfolio. In general, journal postings would only have annotations but when a full forum format (threaded, multiple-reply) is needed, then I would allow a single personal forum to be set up inside the portfolio.
assessment buttons: This another kind of rating, but in a button form (see amazon.com or versiontracker.com). Did you find this post/project helpful? yes no With summaries of how many readers found it helpful. Then the "most helpful" postings/projects could be harvested and displayed in a "place of honor".

Note that I have not used the word "blog" as one of our discussion tools (but the blogging dynamic is there). I do this purposefully because classic blogs out-there in use are actually mini-content management systems with vast powers. I agree we need to clarify functions in our new initiative (formerly called "Blog"). I propose we now call this initiative the "Portfolio". And within the Portfolio we have publishing features (a personal journal in a center pane, a profile in a top pane, and a collection of blocks which lead to all other works (forum postings, assignments, projects, and favorite links) of a student.

Now this raises some questions...

What is the difference between a forum and an annotation? I am not so sure, and I wonder how other collaborative tools handle this. Perhaps an annotation is a simple comment, not a discussion. A single loop-no further replies. Publish-comment. Few, if any settings.
What is the effect of individual learning styles on tool selection? I am a visual learner and I tend to use lots of photos, diagrams and images in my learning. I dislike lots of text or storytelling or even forum dialogue. But others love that. We must not project our preferences onto other learner/teachers. That is hegemony/discrimination in the worst sense. Even if I hate textual journal/blogs, I should allow and encourage that in my students who love them. I need to empower my students with self-assessment tools to determine their own learning style and find learning formats that fit themselves.
What is the meaning of life? 42 or thereabouts.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 5:07 PM

Thanks for raising Portfolios - a good blog is indeed the core of a portfolio system.

In the discussions I had with Daryl, we imagined a new button sprinkled liberally around every activity in Moodle - "Blog this". This would start a new entry to your blog containing an automatic link back to the thing you came from, allow you to bookmark/annotate/record all kinds of activities into your blog and categorise them (for example, you might have a category called "Portfolio" to specify things you wanted to show off to an examiner or to tag for future use).

Later on we could imagine ways of exporting these into some sort of standard portfolio format.

BTW, we also talked about a second button next to it called "discuss this", that would take you to the forum that was linked to that activity (so no need for 'combined' modules ala LAMS).

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Samuli Karevaara - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 6:12 PM

A fruitbasket of all things moodly, all kind-of hyperlinked together... A very intreresting concept, but in the danger zone of becoming a Xanadu.

Uuuh, couldn't help sidetracking "a bit", please split if need be:

Central registries can be a bottleneck of scalability, but I still vision a table with just two columns: "moodleid" and "moodletype". Every object would have one and only one id, no instance id's, no row id. That way you could anchor anything to anything (danger, danger). Mainly comments to objects or to other comments, forming discussion threads.

A factory method to invoke an object of the type and to preload it with the values for the given moodleid. A lot of problems persist, like is thread then an envelope-like object also, what will 'page' object contain and so on.

A vision would also be the template system with slots for object types, then "view" methods for those objects to render themselves on to the template.

Back to the "blog": blog is a nice word as it's short and can be used as a verb also ("Blog this"). I see the thing you describe more as MyNotes or MoodleNotes or something, a scrapbook-like idea.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Art Lader - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 4:21 PM

I would argue that much the value of blogs lies in perceived ownership. A blog belongs to a student in a way that a forum does not.

-- Art

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Joanna Butler - Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 6:34 PM

I agree completely with this. Forums can in many ways be like a discussion in a classroom - there are dominant voices and passive voices. I think for a student lacking in confidence, forums can be very intimidating places. If a student has a blog of which they are the owner and the key contributor it would perhaps allow them to build their ideas and share them without worrying about being shot down.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by James Robertson - Thursday, 11 August 2005, 12:23 AM

Yeah, in a blog one is typically writing with a potential audience in mind, even if they choose not to publish it. This makes blogging an intriguing middle ground between public and private discourse, sort of a personal workspace that can optionally be made public at various levels. For this reason I think it is valuable for more than just the shy. It invites a different kind of discourse (more personal/creative) than a forum normally does. This thread brings up the nature of discussion, and one would expect different formats to invite different types of discussion, which will be more or less appropriate for different learning contexts.

Jim.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Samuli Karevaara - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 4:44 PM

I sincerely apologize that I feel that this is going to be a very very long post. I tend to do that. This is a matter that really should be discussed more thoroughly over a pint / pot of coffee / foosball table (table ice hockey here in Finland, naturally).

Summary of everything that follows:

A blog should be implemented as a spin-off module from Forum, labeled as Blog, with an icon of it's own. To accompany we would need a couple of special side blocks and a course format, maybe. This feels like a natural solution, but somehow always eludes the simplicity when the time comes to do the actual thing. (Do you know Barbapapa )

And here we (well, I) go:

Initial thoughts

Martin D., your ultimate question: simple, unified communication of everything might escape us for the next version or the version after that (or after that). Something to keep the brain warm with though. I'm stepping down a bit for starters and thinking more about the traditional blogs and their meaningful inclusion in Moodle.

I think the first problem you mentioned (or the way I read it, When will users post to a forum and when to their blog?) is a bit of the ball, because the answer is too easily just well... it depends. We don't know and we can't know.

As you go on clarifying, it's a similar problem than with the already existing outlet forums: Which forum do you post to? When do you use a Wiki? When do you create a FAQ article in a Glossary? If you do, do you announce the new FAQ article somewhere? And so on. A helpful thing is to have meaningful places for things and well thought-out subject forums. Still it is clear that a FAQ article or a piece of Wiki can start out as a discussion on a forum or a comment on a Glossary item. Then it is maybe copyedited and copied or moved to another, more natural (in a somewhat subjective opinion, of course) place. This is a natural, organic way to organize things and let the information grow. In my view, it's the only possible way since we don't know the contents of these things beforehand.

So? So it's not so much about Will they use it right? or even about How will they use it?, but more about Are there meaningful uses for it? and yes, thinking about the usability also Will they be completely confused?. My question would be Why do we need/want blogs? This is asked in a benevolent way, mind you! The answer to this question might bring some insight on the nature of blogs versus regular forums.

My suggestion for the in-between solution:

Create a special type of Forum (as a module), that is just labeled blog, with as little difference (code wise at least) to the original Forum than possible. It should share the code base with Forum, but have an (code) interface of it's own. It should have an icon of it's own, as blogs are relatively well known as an entity of their own. This way the similarities with the original Forum might not be as confusing.

I suggest this as I was a bit surprised by the amount of changes in the Moodle core files by the blog addition. I'd think it can be done with far less changes to the core, with a new module, some new side blocks and a course format.

Viewing the blog forum should show the beginnings of the posts immediately, like in the Social format course or in almost all of the blog applications.

Some elaboration on this via commenting on other people's comments:

N Hansen says forum is more of a level playing ground and blog gives a person an air of authority and she is correct. This could be achieved with a regular forum just by specifying the users that are allowed to post to the forum and then, to give the air of authority, advertising this fact somewhere in the forum space. (Cartman, get out of my head when I say authority )

N Hansen also mentions that often bloggers don't read the comments they get or comment on them. It's slightly in the nature of blogs that comes with the authority feel, they are personal outlets. I believe most bloggers do read the comments, and more and more bloggers have been commenting on the comments, by the way.

The N Hansen's point about the quality of the contents of blogs should be disregarded in this matter. 90 percent of everything is crud. (See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law). The quality of the contents produced with an application doesn't necessarily, usually or ever say anything about the quality of the application.

W Page, among with others I'm sure, has been eagerly waiting for the inclusion of blogs to Moodle. They would be the best to answer my question: What features of blogs do you long for?

W Page, you mention few things with her bulleted list but none of those are specific to blogs, really. I'm interesting to know a bit more details about the features you mention, or how you would use them.

Home Page Blog: Do you mean the collected blog entries in the site front page? The site news course format is pretty much similar to this. With the new blog forum we could add a shopping basket that the admin could collect the blogs that will have their entries shown on the front page. Or the blog preferences could be set to be site wide. This presents the problem of students publishing their blog entries on the site front page automatically, so it should be left for the admins to decide.

Course blog format: Again, pretty much like the Social format that exists, showing new posts on the course front page.

Ability to have different themes for different blogs: Moodle 1.5 allows for the courses to have themes of their own, so we could give the bloggers Social format courses of their own with their own theme.

RSS feeds to the blogs: Forums also already have RSS feeds.

Steve Hyndman says that people are using blogs for a lot more than just blogging. This in itself is not a reason to include the blogs in Moodle. We would have to know a bit more on for what and why. If it's just an easy way to get stuff on the web, as it usually is, then Moodle itself is already such a way. Using the Social format course again would allow for the site (or very close to it) Steve linked to (http://education.bowiestate.edu/).

Steve also says that Moodle and blogs should not be integrated. I agree. But it still leaves an option to have a blog-like module and/or blog-like features in Moodle. For this we should know what are the exact qualities of blogs that make them special. (Going in circles, am I? )

Furthermore, Steve says that Moodle has too much for an e-portfolio system. I think e-portfolio is a bit off from blogs, and could be viewed as a separate path of problem-solving. Maybe a personal course for all students that has a lot of things stripped from it. Enabled with a click of an admin button. This might be happening on the way to Enterprise Moodle, where (semi)automatic course creation, automatic categorization, course templates and such come into play.

Don Hinkelman goes a bit further and summarizes, nicely, some of the existing major discussion tools. (I often feel like a major discussion tool myself) If portfolios are seen as a collection of ones work, then the Blog forum would/might work for this.

Then there is the problem with publishing. I would like to see that be all-or-nothing. It's confusing to guess who sees this now and who doesn't. Maybe allow for drafts, but private places for students to publish things to teacher only or to another group of students could/should be handled with Online assignment, group Forums and such.

For Forums, journal, profile: what Don said. The other smaller toolets he mentions could be built when the need arises or the time comes.

To call the brave new system portfolio... Maybe, but maybe not. It's a ambiguous term already.

Art said his stuff in one row of text, amazing I would add the publicity to this also, blogs are usually in their nature very open.

Ok, I'm done for this post. I'm not sure if I actually said anything, that's why I'm thinking of a career in politics (really). But Martin said to hold the ideas and comments to the all messages in a central table for another time

Ps. I really should be writing my Master's thesis, my now got into thinking about this Why is it that it's always easier to do something else than what you're supposed to be doing, no matter how similar the distraction is to the real thing?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 8:04 PM

Woah, big topic. I'll try to condense my reply as much as possible, sorry for any terseness.

Blogs that aren't public are, in my opinion, not blogs. And I don't think anyone that considers themselves a blogging expert i.e. goes to conferences and has 'blogger' in their job description or business card is going to think so either. You could probably make a case for intranet-blogs within a organization or school, but private blogs in particular, that is one's that only the author can read, boggle my mind and stretch the concept further than it can go.

I think if you are going to take advantage of externally generated concepts like blogs or wikis, then it is counter-productive to drift from what these things mean to non-Moodlers. Otherwise people can't tranfer their knowledge.

I fully support combining these things in the back end code, but suggest moving them further apart from the users perspective. This means getting at the nub of the problem and not deviating from it, especially not just because you can.

So getting back to 'private blogs' as an example, keep the functionality, just don't call them blogs. Call them 'notebooks' or 'journals' or something that reflects the core of what they are and then remove an unneccesary option from blogs. Remember that flexibility is often a bad thing in software design, as odd as that may seem.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

There is also the issue of control to think about. I assume that educators each have an idea of what kind of communication they are trying to foster. If they add a 'private journal' to the course then they know (or at least hope if it is truly private) that the student will be using that for noting down their thoughts. If a blog allows private communication, group communication, class communication, Moodle-wide communication and public communication does that mean you have to go in and set your paramaters every time you set up a blog? Do you then need to communicate this purpose to the learners or will they guess based on what they aren't allowed to do (and are those options greyed out, or simply missing?)

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 8:15 PM

Just to address the last paragraph on control: that part is done pretty well in the current Blog. What happens is that you "Add an entry" and choose from a menu who the audience is. Later you can easily browse your blog entries using filters to show just your private entries, for example, or just the entries that your peers can see.

The original reason for making these part of the same interface was that you might want to change the audience. A private entry could be worked on for a while, then shown to the teacher, then opened up to the class or the world. This is perhaps too much functionality, I don't know.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 8:35 PM

That's not quite what I meant.

I'm not overly familiar with Moodle Blogs but I had heard that the 'blogger' had some level of control over their own output. I was wondering whether the creator of the course had a similar degree of control, or if they merely had the option to say either you can blog or nothing at all, with no options in between, say 'only non-public blogging' (which would seem appropriate for young children).

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 9:52 PM

Answering my own question by looking at the demo site linked to above.

It appears there are two modes, moderated or not.

If not moderated then the student blogger makes the decision of the scope of the blog post (public, course-wide etc.)

If moderated then the teacher approves each post, and at the same time chooses the scope of publication (public etc.)

This seems relatively simple, though somewhat restrictive. It does however raise the question of whether this is a blog or not?

Maybe someone should start a wiki page (or two) on the differences and similarities between Moodle forums/blogs/wikis/glossaries and standard blogs.

Note that blogs, unless you allow students the choice to publish in any way they see fit, must always be moderated by teachers. (This capability could easily be added to forums too, I'm guessing that it wouldn't though, as it somewhat disrupts the conversation).

I also note that the 'private blogs' that I thought were bizarre, make much more sense when referred to as 'drafts' that can be later published.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Daryl Hawes - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 10:22 PM

If not moderated then the student blogger makes the decision of the scope of the blog post (public, course-wide etc.)
If moderated then the teacher approves each post, and at the same time chooses the scope of publication (public etc.)
This seems relatively simple, though somewhat restrictive. It does however raise the question of whether this is a blog or not?
The moderation feature was modeled on a capability present in the WordPress blogging package. Why would moderation of a student's publishing capabilities make it not a blog?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Thursday, 14 July 2005, 11:20 PM

Because further up the discussion people were talking about ownership and control as defining what is a blog. For example, someone can start a forum thread like this one, and be considered an equal with the various respondents. On a blog other commenters are more like guests. Indeed this imbalance is often demonstrated by the commenters having to submit to having their comments moderated by the blog host before publication.

I was under the impression that only recently (if at all) did wordpress support what are generally called 'group blogs' where an editorial team, rather than a single voice is presented. Holding back your own thoughts until you decide they are ready to publish is substantially different from having your work approved via an editorial workflow systems that many CMSs (C for content, not Course) implement and which, I assume from your comments, Wordpress now supports. (edit: it turns out I was confusing multiple-blogs, with multiple authors, the latter of which Wordpress has done for a while and with some degree of complexity since 1.5, as far as I can tell--the codex is unreachable at the moment)

Blogs are of course close cousins of Content Management Systems, with a genuine and personal voice being generally held to be a part of that difference, even though the underlying technology is the same (or at least capable of being the same as it expands it's features set, perhaps at some point beyond blogging alone).

As another example, there's been a lot of discussion about corporate blogging recently, where members of staff of an organisation are encouraged to engage with the wider world via blogs. I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest that company lawyers or managers should be allowed to pre-approved entries and I suggest this is because it would be un-bloggy to allow someone else to intermediate the conversation in this way. Instead each person generally has their own personal blog, which perhaps is aggregated into a planet.

I guess my main point is that what Wordpress can do, doesn't define a blog, as there's plenty of blog software out there that does less, and proudly proclaim themselves as blogs. Just like one of those fancy Forums doesn't define a Forum, and Moodle's Forum does less than they do, because Moodle has access to Wiki's and Blogs and Resources etc. and so doesn't have to do everything within one tool. Do we want the best blog, or a simple blog, or maybe a special educational style blog, or one that includes the sum of the features of every blog tool out there? Even if that overlaps to a great degree with other elements of Moodle?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Friday, 15 July 2005, 12:06 AM

I mentioned earlier that, to me, non-public Blogs don't make much sense. This is a link to the Sun Microsystems Guidance for blogging which kind of describes that perspective:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Samuli Karevaara - Friday, 15 July 2005, 12:31 AM

You're talking about Blog, the Publication. But some of this discussion is about Blog, the Application. I keep my personal work diary with Serendipity, and it makes a lot of sense. I needed a way to quickly add notes that I can categorize, and also browse chronologically.

Previously I have tried amongst other Word/OpenOffice.org Writer, Microsoft OneNote (comes close), Outlook notes and several Wiki engines and found that the Blog software came closest to what I wanted.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 1:50 AM

Non-public in Moodle's case can just mean "not outside of the site". On many sites you will still have tens of thousands of people involved which is still a potentially large audience.

I totally agree with your comment that our blog module should be a "special educational style blog", cut down to the bare minimum feature-wise with as little overlap with other modules as possible (difficult!)

Some background: I originally conceived of the idea of a Blog module as replacing the Journal module because people weren't using that the way it was originally designed (one entry per week).

One educational use of Blogs might be this: the teacher says "I want all my students to make one Blog entry per week throughout this course, reflecting on their learning that week. If you are shy, you can keep your comments from other students and just write directly to me. I will comment on your entry if I see you are having difficulties meeting this task." The teacher can monitor combined class entries via an RSS feed, which will be a very useful way to help keep track of learning in the class (pipe it to your screensaver or phone).

Another one might be for students who are working on projects in groups of three - "All of you should keep a Blog detailing research links as you find them, including how they relate to your project. You can use the group view to see all your group entries together". And teachers will have very good information about who has done what in the project.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Ger Tielemans - Friday, 15 July 2005, 9:00 AM

Too much options, that is the danger for Moodle. So lets keep it simple:

If you want a clear democratic discourse to explore an idea, you use forum.
- Drawback I: threads become to long. (Cut them to pieces in subthreads is not the solution. Give busy threads in forums a moderator who summarizes the discussion, who pastes this summary as a button in the head of the long thread, cleans the thread and reseeds the thread with a new start question.)
- Drawback II: discussions go over the hill and die or go very much off topic (same solution, or even less simple: offer the audiance 3 new start questions where they can vote)
- Technical trics can disturb the free discussions, like gradings, stars, hats, karma's etc..
In London you can go to the park, take a box, crawl on it and then shout from above to the passing audiance a bold statement, trying to tickle the public. It is fun to see this, it is a play. For me Blog is such a tool. So yes, you are the owner, and yes you do a very strong statement: a rss-feed to a message-box on the frontpage of your moodle could help you to attrack people. A mechanism that could help here is to create a common (marketplace) page where they have to compete with other bloggers: seven (plus minus two) summaries of blog messages can fill this public screen, losers are send back to their privat room. winners are calculated by a formula that takes in account 1. how new is the message 2. how many people did click on the button to read the whole message 3. how many people wrote a reaction. So the first educational game in Moodle. So no, a blog is any thing but a portfolio
The old journal is clean and simple: it did deserve a better introduction. (maye it should be placed by default in each section, like now the forum in section zero, so teachers could kill them only one by one..) It is privat, it is linear from day to day, only you and your teacher have access.
Wiki is for construction of non-linear artefacts. You can do it on your own (like I did for years with Swiki) or you can share it under educational conditions with others by using eWiki and dfWiki
portfolio is your reorganised collection of educational artefacts and your reflections on these. In combination with Moodle it is not the process portfolio: You can do that much richer in Moodle.
Important are here:
- the student can choose the audiance: privat - inner circle - public
- a simple folder structure with an index page (book style?) could help
- easy setting of audiance: possible on file, folder and subtree level
- possibility to save different views for different audiances
- the student can reorganise the stuff over the folders and views
- import from moodle must be easy as a button press
- export of the complete tree in XML format to take it to the next educational institute..
- Let the audiance deliver comments could be added, maybe with extra modules as 360 feedback, a survey sheet, a rubrics..

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 5:10 PM

About the "blog" game ... if we actually had such a thing do you think anyone would use the forums?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Steve Hyndman - Friday, 15 July 2005, 11:38 PM

Just my 2 cents here....

It would be an individual "teacher" choice based on how the teacher "facilitator" designed and organized the course/environment. Some may stop using forums completely...nothing wrong with that if that suits their needs.

Moodle is merely a collection of tools...users should have maximum flexibility in organizing the actual use of those tools. Whether or not people would use forums if blogs were present is really a "moot"

point in my opinion.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Daryl Hawes - Friday, 15 July 2005, 9:19 AM

Time for a "Long post from Daryl".

David,
Earlier you stated:
As another example, there's been a lot of discussion about corporate blogging recently, where members of staff of an organisation are encouraged to engage with the wider world via blogs. I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest that company lawyers or managers should be allowed to pre-approved entries and I suggest this is because it would be un-bloggy to allow someone else to intermediate the conversation in this way. [...]

You referenced Sun Microsystems' blogging policy as a follow up.

I thought you might enjoy reading this article titled "Sun's CIO backs blogs despite lawyer worries": link

From the article:
For example, he said Sun president Jonathan Schwartz -- who keeps a public blog -- was frustrated when April Fool's day came around, because he couldn't use his blog to play a practical joke.
"A few times, he's said things like 'maybe we should acquire Novell', and it changed the stock price," Vass said of Schwartz's blog. "You have to be careful ... if ever he's writing anything controversial he has to get the lawyers to look at it."

I just thought it amusing that I saw this article as a news topic on the heels of your comments and wanted to share.

My earlier point in asking you about Wordpress's moderation feature is the same as in pointing out the fact that lawyers DO in fact censor corporate blogs. The concept of a blog is quite difficult to define as this discussion thread shows. Having draft, group or public publish states no more defines a blog than the choice of content posted. Early on I tried to find definitions for what a Blog is. I asked myself (and google) "What core functionality must be present to comply with this phenomenon?" Is it the ease with which one can post entries? No, that's a web page. Is it RSS news feeds? No, that's a site which supplies news feeds. Is it the content? No, as we've heard from all corners here people have strog opinions about the content they find on blogs they've come across. The formatting? No, the presentation of blog content differs wildly. What defines a blog?

Finally I boiled it down to these two things which, in my opinion define blogs:

Pingback and Trackback. It took me a while to get my head around these features, which I might add have so far been all but overlooked in this thread. It is my opinion that without at least pingback support a blog page is simply a web site.
Customizability. I view the concept of "a blog" as a personal expression and as such the look and feel of the page and the entry content reflect the person.

Please note that I'm trying (failing?) to stay out of the way of this [excellent, constructive] thread. I'm trying not to reply about specifics regarding the current code base's capabilities or planned features. That's what the rest of this forum is about after all. I'll gladly entertain any questions or comments on the current code base in other discussion threads. I think this thread is for brainstorming without the hinderance of code/implementation details.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Tom Murdock - Friday, 15 July 2005, 10:05 AM

Blogs are 1) pingback and trackback & 2) customizability.

Blogging is reflective inquiry. A way to ponder an artifact: some event, some discussion, some reading. I really love the idea of adding a trackback link to resources, posts, etc., all over Moodle so that students and teachers have an opportunity to start a reflective discussion about anything and everything. Depending on their choice of moderation, the discussion might just be between teacher and student, or student and class.

Maybe every time a person STARTS a discussion based on a trackback (existing artifact), it is a blog entry. The blog post would really just be a new discussion post, open and ready for a conversation, but it would be located in the blog area (customized for the author), rather than a specific forum instance (placed by the teacher). The Recent Activity block would indicate the existence of a new post, and the post would lead back to the blog area.

I've chosen "trackback" rather carefully. At first I liked the "blog this" link, but then it morphed into a simple "reply", but finally, I think the term best indicates that the "new discussion" was inspired by some other specific artifact. I would hope that any blog post would have a link to the thing that inspired it. Likewise, an artifact that has inspired a discussion could indicate a pingback, so that others can investigate the discussion.

Searches would catch both blogs and forums as they are essentially the same thing (noting the difference between private and public blog posts).

p.s. Martin asked us to think of how Moodle might re-see blogs. I think the notion of promoting blog "comments" to full "discussions" indicates that most of us want to express ideas as way of opening a dialogue, not stamping a foot and asking for reactions.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Friday, 15 July 2005, 6:32 PM

Is there not a difference between someone else having to approve every post, and having an expert that you can consult with on tricky subjects and who occaisionally catches you when you don't know you are making a mistake?

It's like the difference between educationalist giving their content to a technologist who then puts it on the web for them, and a technologist providing Moodle and getting out of the way, until they are asked or feel that they can help. From certain angles it seems like a matter of degree, but in my experience it makes all the difference because of ownership.

Note also that my link to Sun's Policy was about the public, conversational nature of blogs rather than my point about ownership. For example Martin says that some Moodle's will have a potential internal audience of tens of thousands. However if, like most blogs, your focus is incredibly narrow, then your potential audience may be only one in a million (if that).

The Sun blog policy suggests that you talk about what you know and people who are interested will come even if your speciality or interest is something utterly esoteric. Being asked to write regularly (rather than follow your own schedule and interest) for an audience that is unlikely to be interested again strikes me as un-bloggy, though obviously you can use blog technology to do this with ease.

The trackback angle is intersting as I had heard that Trackback is Dead with Technorati, Bloglines, Tagging and Folskonomies tipped as the new contenders for linking to related posts, but I would have thought that they mostly make sense in a globally distributed sense i.e. if I'm only linking to other posts within the same Moodle then each post is sitting on the same machine, in the same database table even, so a complicated trackback mechanism that allows you to send messages from one machine to another over the web is unnecessary. Rather, as I think has already been discussed, a 'blog this' button could be added into the interface just as easily as a 'comment on this' and behind the scenes the two would be essentially identical.

In other words, trackbacks allow you to build what is essentially a distibuted discussion forum, once you take the distributed element away, most differences from a discussion forum are primarily vestigial artifacts of the previously distributed nature.

A final point about the spectrum of conversational tools in Moodle: I've occasionally wondered why Moodle doesn't (optionally) allow comments on resources, as it does on Glossary entries and, I guess, Blogs. This technique is often used to build on, annotate and even correct online documents such as the PHP reference.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Don Hinkelman - Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 9:00 AM

Tom wrote: Martin asked us to think of how Moodle might re-see blogs. I think the notion of promoting blog "comments" to full "discussions" indicates that most of us want to express ideas as way of opening a dialogue, not stamping a foot and asking for reactions.

What if each blog entry had a button that said, "Discuss This on Forum". Then moodle would automatically create a forum topic with the blog entry inserted as the first posting. A reader would post a comment under it and others could make a full discussion with replies to replies, etc.

You would not see the discussion on the blog--just in the forum. That way it is clearly a forum that can be entered from multiple entry points. What would set it apart is that Moodle would have a special spot for the Blog Forums. Perhaps a block or an icon at the Topic Zero called "Blog Forums". Each student in the course would automatically get a standard forum set up in their name. Initially there would be no topics, but as readers made comments by starting a topic, it would fill up. This clearly separates discussions (shared content--publically viewed) from blogs (private content--publically viewed). But will buttons ("Back to Blog", "Discuss This"), the connection is maintained.

David wrote: I've occasionally wondered why Moodle doesn't (optionally) allow comments on resources, as it does on Glossary entries and, I guess, Blogs. This technique is often used to build on, annotate and even correct online documents such as the PHP reference.

I agree that non-discussion tools to comment and annotate are very needed. We had a terrible time trying to write a group document in the LD Study course using wiki and forum. I would like to see a simple commenting toolet that teachers can add to documents or resources as David suggests. Here below is a helpful layout as seen on the opensourceCMS website...

Oops! I can't show it--I will make a link. The moodle.org default upload has been reduced from 500kb to 50kb. Wow.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by A. T. Wyatt - Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 10:33 PM

Here is an example, from a site that is very popular at my house (Harry Potter being very important).
http://www.mugglenet.com/editorials/theburrow/damon02.shtml

This site has regular posts, in this case editorials about the books, but each editorial has a link at the bottom to take you to the proper discussion forum. Something like this might be what you are describing, and would allow guided discussion. I have been posting the "prompt" or initial story on my blog as the instructor, and want the students to comment back. The reason I used a blog instead of a private forum is that I also solicited input from public school teachers or other faculty members who had relevant things to add.

Some mentions of this have been made previously, but I find that considering privacy and public access needs to be the main thing I consider when choosing between the two tools. Example: If we have a set of students working in classrooms across the city, they certainly should not be posting comments in a public forum that can be traced back to individuals (I would say supervising teachers also, but certainly not underage students in those classrooms). That would be a case for a private journal, or at most, a private forum for a small group of students or a class. On the other hand, when you want to discuss techniques for involving students in technology it would be quite helpful to read what other people had to say, especially people who are working in the field! That might be a case for a public blog, and the topic/application under discussion would change frequently.

I guess I fall on the side of the argument that blogs are public, directed by a moderator, and not useful for every application. I probably still see what IS, not what COULD BE. Moodle's forums are so good and can be configured so many ways, that they overlap blogs quite a bit. But as an instructor, I would like having the option of choosing the proper tool for my purpose. They look different and their are subtle differences in how they MAY be used, although you could make a forum behave as a blog if you really wanted.

I like having an online diary that people can reply to. I use it to archive works in progress--like setting up and using Moodle on our campus. I don't care to enter personal information, but it is nice to have a way to journal project development. Can you imagine going back and rereading blogs from the early years of Apple or Microsoft? Or ARPANET? Or Moodle? (this is actually happening now, only in forum mode)

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) - Thursday, 21 July 2005, 1:21 AM

Hi all,

I've spend sometime reading all these posts (really interesting!) and I wanted to write some (a few

) lines about my perspective.

First of all, I must affirm, without a doubt, that I'm not a teacher, nor my pedagogical skills are considerable nor I've used any blog in my life

(at least consciously).

So I'm not going to say if blogs are a proper tool for Moodle, or if they overlap with forums, or if any of their characteristics is negative in an learning environment.

All I want to remark is that it's a tool. One more tool. Simply that. How it is used and how it becomes an add value for the learning process is something that every moodler has to decide.

In the past years, I've seen some amazing examples of alternative uses to activities whose primary use was really simple. For example. the glossary, a simple concept-definition tool, is being used to build knowledge in a lot of different flavours (combining it with the multilang filter to learn languages, like a repository, like an appointment system, like an assignment activity...). And all those uses were 100% success for each *particular* experience.

And, I must repeat it, the glossary is, at least conceptually, a well defined activity with its "official" use. So, if we add a new tool like Blogs to Moodle, whose borders aren't really well defined (at least for me), won't this add a lot of possibilities to the whole learning process? I really think that all the posts above, discussing about things like overlapping with other activities, expected features and so on, perhaps, are hiding the "forest behind the trees" (an Spanish proverb, not sure of its equivalence in English) saying that our initial *constraints* are forbidding us to see the enormous potential such a tool could add to the learning experience.

As I see the Blog module, it's a white sheet of paper available for everybody (exactly like posts, wiki, journal, assignment, glossary, resources, portfolios, repositories...!), it's every teacher responsibility to decide how such sheet is going to be used. And I'm pretty sure that all you are able to discover incredible uses for it. Absolutely sure!

In my opinion, that's one of the strong points of Moodle. Its ability to allow everybody to "think different" (sorry Apple, I've used your well-known slogan!

). That's the key. That freedom to build, not restricted to common tools, using our imagination to empower the learning experience without limits (but the RAM of your server

) is important, isn't it? At least it sounds great!

So, finishing with my post, and repeating that my point of view is absolutely innocent and without any real e-teaching nor blogs experience, simply I must conclude that I want to see Blogs in Moodle. It doesn't matter if they overlap, confuse, miss something or whatever negative point I was able to imagine. I want to see Blogs in Moodle. Sure!

Ciao

PS: and sorry if my posts is out of scope. It was a bit difficult to me to follow all the discussion!

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Daryl Hawes - Thursday, 21 July 2005, 9:22 AM

The trackback angle is intersting as I had heard that Trackback is Dead [...]
I had a chance to look over the "trackback is dead" article you linked to. I had not realized when you posted it that you were joking. One person upset over the abuses of a system does not make that system dead. I'm all for the ongoing discussion on what is better but there is no viable replacement for it that I can see yet.

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Trackback is Dead?

by David Scotson - Friday, 26 August 2005, 5:06 PM

Sorry for the late reply to this point, I didn't see pour comment until now but I just wanted to clarify that I wasn't joking. The debate's not over, but that link was from a respected web dude who works for the BBC and there's more agreeing opinions here:

Trackback is Dead by Jeremy Zawodny

The comments on all these blogs cover both sides of the argument (including, I think, the guy who invented Trackbacks) but I just wanted to be clear that I wasn't joking and it's not just one random grumpy blogger who think this may be the case.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Richard Treves - Thursday, 25 August 2005, 11:37 PM

Uh-oh, just come across this thread. I'm up to eyeballs in work so I have only skim read it, if this is covering previously covered ground I'm sorry.

My humble 2p worth:

David Scotsman: "blogs that are not public are not blogs" has my vote as the crux of the matter. Blogs are outward facing and principally a one to many form of communication. Forums are restricted in view and are principally many to many.
Site news on the front page is a kind of blog, I would love to see this developed so that we could have a 'blog' or 'site news' attached to each course that is viewable by anyone at all, but within a course, I want to communicate with students via forums.

As for their communication with me, a private forum between them and me or more public within the course (split by groups for example) works fine.

Basically, the origonal question is valid but I think exisiting forum functionality delivers all you could need in a teaching situation. Adding a 'blog' that is not outward looking is just adding clutter and uncluttered courses are simple which is good for our weaker students.

Richard

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Re: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion wiki

by David Scotson - Friday, 15 July 2005, 7:00 PM

I've started a wiki page for this, I thought listing differences and similarities would help get a clear picture of what we're talking about:

wiki page

A technical question which has some relevance to this discussion:

Is it possible to have private RSS feeds? Or in other words, can you authenticate users before they access them? I've used a few services that have came with warnings when you switch on RSS feeds which generally gave me the impression that if it was RSS then it was public. Can anyone confirm this?

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Re: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion wiki

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 15 July 2005, 8:47 PM

Is it possible to have private RSS feeds? Yes, but:

a) You have to use Basic authentication
b) You have to use a reader that supports it

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Bob Irving - Wednesday, 20 July 2005, 12:33 AM

I'm coming to this discussion late, having been referred by WPage from the facultyroom at thinkingdistance.org.

I love it that we are having this discussion! How great is open source software!

My .02: The blog module is the one module I wish Moodle had. I see a blog as "my little corner of cyberspace and how I see the world". I teach Middle Schoolers, so that perspective is pretty important for that age group, I think. My question is... how does that lend itself to a social learning environment, like Moodle? Is there room for that kind of personal space within the Moodle space? Does it detract from the learning? Does it add to it? The more I read here, the more I wonder if there is an inherent distance between the two approaches. I love both blogging and Moodle; I just am not sure how they go together (you can read my blog at http://www.e-lcds.org/wordpress). And I think Martin has some good concerns about what is a forum post, what is a blog post, etc.

As for reflective learning, in my writing workshop class, I used the weekly journal entry for that. I liked the results, but it wasn't a blog, since only I and the student read what they wrote.

Sorry if I have no solutions at the moment. But I do love the process that we're following and believe this is the best way to find solutions.

Bob Irving

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Carol Cooper-Taylor - Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 11:19 AM

Bob wrote:
"As for reflective learning, in my writing workshop class, I used the weekly journal entry for that. I liked the results, but it wasn't a blog, since only I and the student read what they wrote."

IMHO a blog is still a blog even if only your mother reads it.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Aaron Mandel - Thursday, 21 July 2005, 4:44 AM

A quick thought. In my Masters work at Columbia's Teachers College this Summer we have been talking a lot about bloging in education. Many of my course mates are curious about Moodle and I shared this thread with a few of them this morning. I have not been able to plow through all the responses here so please forgive me if this has already been stated.

Here is our idea:

A student has a blog within a Moolde course, maybe they mostly use it like a journal, for reflective purposes... Perhaps the blog could have a feature allowing students to choose to post their blog post to a larger forum (similar to an aggregater) on the main course page. The post would then appear in their personal blog, and in a designated forum. Responses/comments to the students blog post could then be made in the forum or blog and would all show up for everyone to see in the aggregater forum and the individuals blog.

Expand this a little bit so that students could choose which forum their post was copied to instead of just an aggregater forum.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Will Richardson - Sunday, 24 July 2005, 12:10 AM

This is a great thread, and this, I think, is my first post to the Moodle community. Thanks to all for making it possible.

I've been using blogs in my classrooms for four years, and I can say they are powerful learning tools. I can't wait for them to be integrated into Moodle, and here's how I see them being used. The power of Moodle, to me, is the ability to create a safe, private learning environment for teachers where students can discuss and create in collaborative ways. I'm still new to the software, but I can see that it's an amazing work. Blogs will be a distinct addition that will allow students to take control over a piece of the learning, to reflect, to think, to link, and to write in a public way, I hope. It's interesting that so many still see blogs as journals or portfolios. They're not. Journals are journals; portfolios are portfolios. Blogs are for blogging, which as a genre is made up of reading what others have written, thinking critically about that content, and synthesizing disparate or similar ideas into writing that is connective and reflective. They are also for sharing what we've learned. It is all about trying to make sense of the topic, asking questions in a public way, provoking more thinking. It's saying, in essence, here's what I've found, here's what I think, how does it hold up?

With Moodle, then, I see blogs as the public window on a student's learning, the place where she takes what she has learned and gives it to a larger audience to get feedback in a different context. It's a place where she can act authoritatively, because she is the authority on her own learning. And she can do it in a personalized, creative space that she controls. That's a crucial distinction, I think, from a forum.

To me, blogs in Moodle are a natural fit.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Bob Irving - Sunday, 24 July 2005, 12:27 AM

Welcome to the Moodle community, Will, and thanks for sharing your experience and insights on blogging here. I hope that your perspective will help crystallize people's thinking about blogs and Moodle. I know it has certainly helped to clarify my own thinking as a sometime blogger .

I see blogs in Moodle as a great marriage of the personal and the social facets of learning. The question is... how will it work? I like Martin's idea of blog authors being able to choose different audiences for publishing (teacher, class, individual, school, world). Would the discussion on the blog seem disjointed if "the world" could only read part of it, I wonder?

Let's keep this great discussion going.

Bob Irving

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Will Richardson - Sunday, 24 July 2005, 4:35 AM

Hi Bob,
I don't think it would be disjointed at all, in fact I think it would be a great way for K-12 students to be able to ease their way into blogging which, as I've said before, is a much different and, I would argue, more sophisticated form of discourse than journaling, etc. Many blog softwares (Manila, Wordpress, etc) currently give those options to writers, and while adult bloggers may not make as much use of them, I think teachers and students would find those options valuable. And I'd hope that there would be ways to approve comments from the outside as well. But I do think it's crucial that the blog portion of Moodle be customizable by the student, and that it can become uniquely his or hers.

Will

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Ann Shultz - Monday, 25 July 2005, 8:23 PM

I am one of those people who've been trying to get my head around this new blogging thing. Since I teach a professional development course for educators about using the journal in the classroom, my first inclination was to see the blog as basically a journal that makes use of electronic technology and the Internet.

Our blog discussion in our Faculty Room at Thinking Distance has begun to expand what I now see as my narrow view of the blog. Will's stressing of the personal thinking and reflecting about one's learning with the ultimate sharing with an audience puts on a different plane than the private journal.

I think of the Socratic discussion...are we doing a bit of that when we engage in blogging?

P.S. Thanks, Bob, for pointing me to the Moodle blog discussion, and to Will's useful comments about bloggin in moodle. The fog shifts on the blogosphere horizon and I see a, a....blog??!

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Emma Duke-Williams - Monday, 25 July 2005, 11:09 PM

I've just found this fascinating thread, thanks to Will.
I work with Under & Post Graduate students, and we've been using Blogs with a small group of PostGrad students on an MSc in eLearning, alongside WebCT. Like Will, I see blogs as the public view of the students learning. These students are currently 2nd year students, and in the first year, they had a private forum in WebCT - just for them & the tutor, as a learning journal.
At the start of the second year, in the first semester, we got them to use Blogs (via Blogger). We got mixed reactions - some liked the idea of their classmates being able to read their thoughts, others weren't so keen, but we encouraged them all. They were all given each other's URLs, and, judging by the (admiteddly infrequent) comments, they did read them - for some it was clearly a case of "gosh, don't you get that either ..." or " hey, that's a good idea".

We still used the discussion boards in WebCT - generally with a tutor posed question. Often, a WebCT posting would refer to a blog, though they didn't tend to refer the other way - possibly because you can't put a link from a Blogger Blog to a WebCT posting. Were it all in the same environment, then I think they might have.

Certainly these students appeared to like the customisation - some changed templates frequently, they seemed to be able to judge what was "bloggable" and what "forumable".
Finally, one of the biggest features in their favour, I think, is that when the unit was over, at the end of semester 1, and they no longer were required to use the blogs, most still did.

I'd therefore say that within Moodle, a blog tool would be very useful - and add to the tools - though, like all tools - doesn't have to be used.

Emma
P.S. I like the notes at the side about reading, writing & questions! Neat.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Don Hinkelman - Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 7:50 AM

Hi Emma, Ann and everyone,

Very helpful context for this discussion. I was particularly interested in your comment that students seemed to be able to judge what was bloggable and what was forumable. You also made a good point that the links need to go both ways: blog>>forum, forum>>blog.

Now back the original question Martin posed. Note, the question is not whether Moodle should have a blog (a first version is already programmed!--Thanks, Daryl), the question is how to deal with two kinds of postings: blog postings and forum postings.

Are they both the same? And do they operate in the same format?
Or are blog postings just comments (no replies)?
What happens if I start a discussion on the blog that duplicates a discussion on the forum?
Should the discussion be on the same screen as the blog entry?
Should a blog entry be automatically copied and made the first entry of a new forum discussion?
Should I be able to categorize my own blog entries? How would this affect the discussions?
Should I view the discussions only in my blog area, or should they be viewable from multiple points (my blog area, the general forums, a special mega-blog area where all blog discussions can be viewed)?
If a discussion starts out very narrow (just direct comments on my blog entry) but then gets wider, should I be able to split off the discussion and move/copy it to a public forum?

So everyone, do you have any thoughts on these questions?

Its getting quite complex as you see (David has pulled together many points on a wiki here), and has potential for confusion (though Eloy would say, don't worry about the confusion--I can make anything backup/restore tongueout

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Ger Tielemans - Sunday, 21 August 2005, 9:07 PM

...and you bring in a new element: when a Moodle course with it's teacher initiated forums is over, it must be possible to go on with your blogging!

Maybe blog should live on that (soon coming?) dashboard extension of the personal page of each student?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Josie Fraser - Monday, 22 August 2005, 6:45 PM

I think Ger has very precisely hit the central blogging paradox on the head here. If Moodle blogs are only ever an activity within the platform, then how do we support the kind of autonomous learning and online experience that blogging and blog communities can potentially foster? Do we reduce Moodle blogs to the status of starter blogs, giving staff and students a taste of what can be achieved, but limiting blog use to instructor-led tasks or institutional student roles?

My wishlist would be for a separate but fully intergrated Moodle blogging tool, which could be run independently - allowing moodle partners to host blogging services, institutions to offer blogging as part of or separate from the central Moodle platform, - basically enabling students and staff to have their own blog with a degree of autonomy, where appropriate. I'd also like to see an easy content export tool for Moodle bloggers wanting to move their blogs, either to other Moodle blogs or to other blog platforms. The facility to do this would also make Moodle blogs a perfect tool for portfolios.

Maybe ElggMoodle or WordpressMoodle?

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Carol Cooper-Taylor - Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 11:26 AM

Right on Will

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Miles Berry - Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 1:05 AM

I'm rather late coming to this outstanding discussion, which, despite being a regular on moodle.org, I found through Weblogg-ed!
A few observations:

Blogs are about the students rather than the course(s) - I'd see them, as Darren has above, as an extension of the profile page. They would acknowledge that there's more (breadth and depth) to learning than simply the course content. They can thus foster more independent learning, again beyond the bounds of the traditional course structure, presenting a more holistic approach to education.
They provide a further opportunity for learner voice, appreciation of multiple perspectives, and awareness of a wider audience that are, for me, important parts of constructivist learning.
As has been remarked above and elsewhere, the potential to use a learner's blog as some form of e-portfolio should not be overlooked, and would provide functionality presently lacking in Moodle.
The ubuntu forums provide both discussion and blog / journal tools (see http://ubuntuforums.org/journal.php?do=topjournals): it's worth having a look to see how the two happily co-exist, although these are certainly not shining examples of blogs - I think in part it's the lack of personalisation that's the problem here.
Whilst, as you may have gathered, I'm generally in favour of introducing blogs to Moodle, my one big concern is that this has the potential to move the emphasis of Moodle from a social to a personal / individual view of learning. Whilst this may well be the direction in which UK education is about to head (again), I feel much may be lost as a result. I feel elgg have gone some way to avoid this, by placing a big emphasis on social networking and tagging, and I hope Moodle's site level blogs might one day incorporate similar features.

For our own part, I'm eager to explore blogs with my pupils in the next year, initially in place of their 'create a personal homepage' IT activity, but also as a way of encouraging them to reflect on the whole range of their school (and out of school) experiences, rather than just those which relate to the subjects with Moodle courses.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Josep M. Fontana - Thursday, 28 July 2005, 2:06 AM

Hi Miles,

Interesting contribution (good fit in a thread that is particularly filled with excellent contributions).

>Whilst, as you may have gathered, I'm generally in favour of introducing blogs
>to Moodle, my one big concern is that this has the potential to move the
>emphasis of Moodle from a social to a personal / individual view of learning.

I don't really share your fears. Moodle has many other modules where users are in a way on their own. In the assignment module, for instance, the user is usually involved in a pretty individual kind of activity. Having assignments (or quizzes or SCORM, etc.) has not meant that Moodle has lost anything. Rather the opposite. No matter how constructivist you are, I think there is a place for individual reflection and expression. I don't think adding a tool like the blogs would impair the collaborative nature of Moodle in any way.

In fact, by their very nature, blogs can very well have the opposite effect. While it is certainly true that with blogs individuals have more control over "their own" space (as opposed to forums, which are not controlled by any particular individual), it is also true that blogs typically emerge as responses to events or discussions elsewhere and, what is more important, they also normally trigger more responses and discussions, whether they are via the 'comment' functionality or otherwise. I can easily imagine new social networks emerging in a course as an effect of the blogging activities of its participants which might not emerge just with forums.

Another interesting side effect is that blogs in a way introduce (surreptitiously

) a feature that some have asked for in Moodle and that might be implemented in the future: the possibility of assigning different roles to students. In a blog, the student is de facto assigned the role of moderator/discussion leader, or even "teacher" in her own space (and also, of course, she is "the designer" of her own space, although technically I don't know whether one could call this properly a 'role'). Anyway, I think that might be an important element in the learning process. I definitely believe that blogs can only bring positive things to Moodle.

Josep M.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Miles Berry - Sunday, 7 August 2005, 2:23 AM

The more I read and think about blogs, the more I come round to this way of thinking Josep. Thank you.
A couple of posts on James Farmer's incsub seem relevant to this discussion, and to my wider interest in educational use of blogs:
Have a glance at this one about the need for blogs alongside discussion forums, and another more recent one about the pedagogical impact of blogs.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Josep M. Fontana - Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 2:36 AM

Thanks for the link, Miles. I think in fact this contribution does provide some good theoretical argumentation in support of blogs as useful tools in social constructivist learning environments.

Josep M.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Mike Cosgrave - Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 4:41 PM

Having read the thread quickly, it is clear that what I want to say mostly falls into the heading of adding another vote to some things...

Even if everything is just a lump of bits in a MySQL table, what it is called does matter to students. To me, a 'forum' is a public discussion, an 'assignment' is something 'they' have to submit to me and a journal was a personal, reflective, learning diary, and a blog might be a workable replacement for a journal. Lets face it, essays, poems and drawings are all just ink on paper, but people approach them with different intents - and have different favourite writing tools for them - pen, pencil, marker - but might always write at the same desk.

So I think that even if the underlying architecture is very simple and shares a lot, at the front-end, it can and does matter to students if they click on the 'forum' button or the 'blog' button. I think there will be students who would not be as comfortable using a 'private forum' as they would be using a 'journal' - and maybe for this reason 'blog' is not a good word either. Equally, of course, in different places, cultural differences may mean that other people may call things differently, or use the same tools in entirely different ways.

I do think there should be a space in moodle for personal reflective writing, and I must say I am more comfortable with 'journal' than 'blog' as a label for that; perhaps we should have a 'journal' which simply uses the blog engine but which is by default private, as well as a 'blog' with is more public but has an authorial voice that a 'forum' lacks.

My 2c
Mike

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Steven Geggie - Monday, 1 August 2005, 9:25 PM

Martin,

I have been thinking about blogs for our university environment. (the TIU Blogosphere). This would be a place where any individual could create their own blog sites, incorporate permalinks, archives, allow comments, categorize/subtopic, trackbacks, searches, RSS, etc...

The Blog belongs to the student (and/or faculty member) and is accessed in the context of the "blogosphere". I would envision that a Moodle Blogosphere would manage hundreds or maybe even thousands of personal blogs in the context of a single Moodle installation. Each blog will be totally personalized to suit the authors purpose. I suspect that student s will use this as a replacement to their personal websites......it will be a way for them to share ideas, opinions, and snapshots of a "day in the life". (perhaps we can extend the blogs to be categorized and accessed in a similar manner that courses are..).

I also believe that the blogs will serve as a host for podcasts....we will actually create a studio for students and faculty to record ther podcasts and then post them...

I've been thinking that a Moodle forum is subject (or course) oriented, and will serve a very specific purpose in a very specific context...At TIU, forums are mostly used by faculty to make class announcements, solicit ideas, etc...Students have been using forums to ask questions of the entire class. (like does anyone have the notes from the last class, or who wants to form a study group)

Just a few thoughts

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Will Richardson - Monday, 1 August 2005, 10:56 PM

I think the Weblog is a crucial part of a student's learning toolbox insomuch as it's a great way to create a personal space to archive ideas and share thinking and learning in a public way. But I do think that one stumbling block here may be the availability of these blogs to students after the course is over. As more and more student work is created digitally, blogs are going to become a part of a student's online learning portfolio (see the work that Helen Barrett has been doing in this area) and therefore it will be important that they are able to travel with the student. What I would like to see is a way to create a totally customizable Moodle blog on a separate server that I could easily connect into any Moodle space I was using. I have no idea how that would work, but that would go a long way toward making a Weblog a lifetime learning space, which is what it has become for me. That way, students could keep the same space regardless of what classes they are taking, but they could also use it for personal postings as well. And I'm sure it wouldn't be too much more of a step for the student to be able to control what is seen by the various classes he is a part of...i.e. only science related posts for the science class etc.

The overall idea here is that a Weblog becomes the collection, connection and distribution point for a person's learning.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Steven Geggie - Tuesday, 2 August 2005, 2:57 AM

I agree with your thoughts regarding a weblog is a separate, persistent tool that the student (or faculty) will use and change based on their present situation.

Similar to courses, I'd like to see a BLOG index where folks can access blogs based on categories, authors, etc...

On the Moodle Home page, there could be a list of courses and then someplace else there can be a list of blogs.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Leon Cych - Friday, 16 September 2005, 5:39 PM

"I also believe that the blogs will serve as a host for podcasts....we will actually create a studio for students and faculty to record ther podcasts and then post them..."

Yes I think there should be blogcasting features embedded. I would like to see something similar to loudblog but with multimedia features enabled as well.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Marco Kalz - Tuesday, 2 August 2005, 3:25 PM

Hello all, many things have been said that I could underline. I used the journal in my last online-courses to offer a place for some "private metareflection" but the journal was not useful for this regarding you could only work on one posting per week (as Martin said the module has been "misused"). I wish I would have a blog where students could decide if they post private, for the teacher, or for all students.

I think the way Martin is thinking about using blogs is exactly the way i would have used it in my courses and it makes sense to let these blogs private. BUT: If you have RSS - you are open! I already used the RSS-function of the forums and tracked them through bloglines. What happened? I found some forum postings on an RSS-directory - and there were kinda "private chats" in here. So if you want private blogs - you need private RSS, otherwise the spiders will find the feeds. I am happy that there is the possibility for private feeds.

Another experience regarding forums/blogs: The forums are often the place for the communicative learners who like to share their thoughts in public...but there are always people who don´t just make it to speak publicly. For them, the blog fits more to their needs than the forums.

Great discussion by the way

Marco

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by James Robertson - Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 1:17 PM

I appreciate all the discussion about blogs vs forums -- many fine points. But for me the clincher in the argument for blogs is my 18-year-old daughter who loves to blog. She is especially pleased with some of them, and reads them out loud to me. She explains why she wrote it and why she expressed herself the way she did, and what other approaches she might have taken but didn't. She also reads blogs from her friends that she really enjoyed and talks about what makes them enjoyable.

From my vicarious blogging experience with her, I see two substantial differences between blogs and forums. First, as noted several times, is the sense of ownership. Blogs belong to the owner. This does not make them anti-social any more than exploring one's self-concept makes one a hermit. The second is in part a consequence of the first: blogs are more like creative writing while forums are more like questions and answers.

Last night's blog (in which she was a respondent rather than the owner) was about superheros, comparing and contrasting. It was all in fun and might have seemed pretty silly, (spiderman vs batman vs superman) but by the end a lot of ideas about what it means to be heroic, or the nature of the good were discussed. I realize it could just as well have been assigned as a forum discussion, but would it have been? Others have been more stream-of-consciousness, some reflections on the day's activities. In general they are prepared with much more thought than a private journal entry. I don't expect any of us will care in five years about last Wednesday's date. But the way it was expressed and the reflections about it will probably be of interest to us for a long time. Not surprisingly, her abilty in trying out ideas, expressing herself, and seeing events in alternative ways has grown substantially through this activity.

So the point is, if personal expression and a context for creative writing have a place in your particular course, you will probably be glad to have blogs in Moodle. At present, they probably don't in the technical training courses I teach -- but I want them available for others, who will be teaching the courses my daughter takes.

Jim.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Kirsty Trigg - Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 7:05 PM

It's great to get into the semantics, and down to the nitty gritty, but I have a problem that needs solving, and hours of contemplation isn't really helping me fix it!

We are a commercial firm, and we are going to be hosting a course produced in house.

What we are looking for is essentially a diary system, that allows the user to create a new entry to keep notes based on what they have learnt.

Ideally the user needs to be able to review the notes they made, perhaps over the last week or so, with ideas about where they might expand on their learning, or with problems they might want to bring up with a tutor. A search facility would make this the sort of versatile tool we need.

The journal in it's current form simply doesn't fit the bill.

The client is not going to be happy with having to look through a long screed of notes for the one line they wrote on Tuesday 2nd January, and they can hardly call us up to say, oh, can you just create a journal for me.

Blogs might be irksome to some of us, but they are of real semantic use for us.

They will allow students to keep notes based on their learning. A blog fits the bill for this ideally.

Journals might be useful for small scorms, but ours are large, and we won't be using the weekly format, which makes the meaning of a journal a bit ropey.

Simply put, journals simply aren't flexible enough for us. Now we either have to find an alternative that is stable enough for the client, or we have to do the development work ourselves...

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Michael Penney - Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 10:02 PM

Hi Kristy, wouldn't the wiki module work for this? Since it keeps track of changes it seems to me it might be even better than a blog for a personal learning journal.

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Re: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion: journals are not that bad

by Ger Tielemans - Sunday, 21 August 2005, 9:42 PM

I agree with Michael that wiki is the better tool for constructing (and revision over time) of a private or collab knowledgetree.

To comment on your journal remarks:

In the original design of journal, you would use a journal for each course week and get an overview of all your week journal notes by clicking on the item >>journals>> in the navigation bar.

So, when you - as a student - are writing down reflecting notes in your journal "page" of week 6 of that course, you have that eureka experience and go back to your notes in week 3 and "repair" your wrong thoughts about the topics of that week... (And you make a note of your earlier misunderstanding, handy to look back in the week before the final exams..)

SCIENCE is educated as a set of facts, very boring!

Would it not be more interesting for students to read it as the week journals of that scientist who discovered that item?
(I got this idea from the journal description of the WISE project. ISBN 0-8058-4302-7)

I still remember the story of the Belgian scientist who discovered the solution for the benzeen formula: he had a heavy meal (oisters?) and slept not good that night, dreaming of circles: eureka!! benzeen is a circle!..

.. I saw on Discovery channel the discovery of the tomb of some Egypt Queen in a docu-drama format, seen through the eyes of the femal scientist: "Today I go to the central lab of the state Ohio to hear the results of the lab tests: Will they confirm my hypotheses and make me famous, or...

I must say, I waited longer before I zipped away to another channel then normally..

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Craig Brown - Thursday, 11 August 2005, 5:07 PM

I think that as long as the purpose of why you are using it and what is expected from it are clear then there should be no problems with blogs/forums.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Aneesha Bakharia - Friday, 12 August 2005, 3:33 PM

I highly recommend reading this article from CommonCraft entitled "What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?" (especially the table)

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000768.html

Matrix of uses of Blogs in education:

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000393.html

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Julian Ridden - Sunday, 14 August 2005, 8:55 PM

Hi all,

I thought it about time that I should be daring enough to jump into this discussion.

Before I start I want to introduce two concepts in to this discussion.

"What teachers call technology, students call everyday tools"
and
"Teaching should drive technology, and not necessarily the other way round"

These are two quotes I find myself constantly using with my own teaching staff, many of whom question why we introduce technology like messaging, online file storage, personal email, forums and blogs into our college's online learning environment.

The technologies listed above are used by a large portion of our students on a daily basis. Tools such as Hotmail, ICQ, AIM, Blogger, wikipedia and forums all over the web are constantly accessed by students with a thirst for information and instantaneous communication. be it either with a friend down the street or around the globe.

I believe one of the key roles of IT integrators is to ensure that we continue to engage our students using their tools, not just the ones we feel most comfortable with. By taking these tools our students already enjoy using and turning it into a controlled learning delivery device, we not only better engage our students, but also find better, faster and more efficient ways of reaching the, not only at school, but outside as well.

Bringing this back to the discussion topic at hand. Blogs are a tool that are becoming more and more popular with our students personally on a daily basis. Many of which are not necessarily listed as our most "IT savvy" of students. It is a tool that allows for information storage and retrieval, for the publication of personal reflective journals and for communities of those with similar views to connect together. All these objectives I see well suited to curriculum delivery as much as to the original ideas that our students had for using them in the first place.

While Blogging can get confusing in all its shades and variations and the confusion/hostility of those not familiar with it is warranted, the benefits of its integration into a college LMS far out-ways its detriments. The key focus here has to be the controlled nature of its delivery. And to do this involves basic up-skilling of teachers to understand the concepts and the possible application of these concepts to their classrooms. Have the "teaching needs" drive the use of the technology. Examples of such application include

Use of the Blog as a personal Journal.
- For reflection of personal circumstance
- Use in assessment (ie Art or Drama assessment journals)
- Historical use. (prepare a journal as if you were a convict in 1788)
A portfolio tool
Sharing and discussing of personal views and opinions
Idea/Note/Info storage by teachers and/or students

Discussion attached to blogs may have their place in some of these activities and not others. Likewise the ability to link blogs, or havecirtain Moodle activities linking back.

I believe the main secret to the success here is in adaptability of the blogs to suit the environment and purpose for which they are being installed. thus creating options for; allow replies, allow automatic linking, allow public viewing, set start date for entries (ie 1788), etc

I sum this all up with one last point. Teachers still control a classroom (or at least attempt to) online or off. Abuse of blogs, incorrect usage or essentially anything that goes outside the defined parameters for the specific aim that the teacher has set can still be addressed directly by the teacher to the student and be rectified. The initial fear of blogs hijacking forums I believe fits under this. If it does start to happen, the teacher should redirect this discussion to a forum. The fact that the discussion has started should be seen a s a bonus, not a negative. In most situations (and I do understand not all) a teacher has a student number in their class/group to make this manageable.

I hope all this makes some sense to some of you and is helpful

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Thierry Klein - Sunday, 21 August 2005, 9:25 AM

I am very new in this community (actually just registered today) and very impressed by what I read here. This is one of the richest threads about blogs and forums I've ever read.

Back to topic now:

Whatever the limitations of blogs, the fact is people use them everywhere today (and in many cases the use of the blog is just diverted. Blogs are not only used as blogs, but as agendas, web sites, forums, receipes database, CMS, etc...). One of the reasons for their success is that they are so simple that people who could never enter any content with previous tools are able to do it with blogs, another one (quoted in this thread) is certainly sense of ownership. Whatever the reasons, the fact is there.

So I do believe that introducing blog in Moodle is a great idea. I do believe many professors will eventually deliver most of their course events (agenda, documents, unplanned remarks, announcements and even quizzes) through the blog feature. This is especially true for professors who do not use Moodle yet (who, hopefully for Moodle, represent the future majority of users but of course this majority is very quiet today !).

In other words, I think Moodle may very well by many seen by the professor as "just a blog" with some specific (so-called) educational features. If this happens, I think this can be an enormous source of growth for Moodle because some people who would never use a LMS, even as nice as Moodle is today, would start using it as a "blog" tool. At the very least, a professor who wants to use it that way should be able to.

So what could be of help for this professor ?
- a "blogging" mode where the blog is the central part of the class. But this blog may have various "types" of content so professor can enter articles (default) but also agendas, calendars, and may be quizzes. So a quiz would just be an entry with a specific type. (In other words, this is a "blog-centric" mode)
- professors often give courses many times. So it's probably nice for them to republish some blog articles in a future class. Here we come to multi-blog management features. See for instance some nice things b2evolution is doing with multi-blogging, aggregation of various blogs into one, etc (note: it should be made even simpler in Moodle to reach purpose).... So there should be easy possibilities to reschedule articles (most blogs do that), but also to re-publish articles in another blog (with or without comments).
- Of course, the idea of moving the "comments" part to a forum (when relevant) is also a very cool idea, but it should be seen, somehow as "a special case" of re-publishing.
- another application of re-publishing is that professor often have "constants" in their courses (introduction, presentation, mode oof interaction, philosophy)...Those are also blog entries that shoudl be "republishable"

Again, I am conscious I don't know enough of Moodle so some of my views may just be completely foolish.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Julian Ridden - Sunday, 21 August 2005, 11:15 AM

No ones views are ever foolish. I mean, apart from some of mine :D

Welcome to the community. I hope you enjoy your stay :P

Julian

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Mueller - Friday, 26 August 2005, 7:16 AM

Can I answer a question with another question?

What business problem will be solved if blogs are added to Moodle? What is the business need?

There is a lot of good discussion about blogs and whatnot, but what does Moodle need? If it looks like a blog, call it a blog.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Geoffrey Glass - Friday, 26 August 2005, 11:54 AM

I just discovered this discussion through a reference in a blog. For now, my comments will be from a structural perspective: what is present in forum posts, what in blog posts, what is common and what is different.

Work on annotation for Moodle discussion forums led me to a search for a standard format for forum posts. To that end, I have been participating in a discussion at microformats.org about creating a blog post microformat (which I believe is the right place to start looking for a forum post format).

Here are some of the differences that I've noticed; many of them are apparent in the microformat analysis:

Blog posts almost always have permalinks, that is, a unique unchanging URL for each post. This is not always the case with forum posts (e.g. in Moodle).
Forum posts often have a hierarchy, reflected by a link to the parent post, or to the top of the discussion.
Forum posts tend to include a lot of information about the writer: location, sex, avatar, post count, status (junior, senior, etc.), registration date, signature, by-line.
Forum posts are sometimes numbered. I've never seen this in a blog.
Blog posts may have separate publish and update dates. They may also have visible edits (added and deleted text).
Linking is much more common in blogs.

I think blog post permalinks are very important, because blog posts tend to stand-alone: a unique URL makes a post a first-class resource on the Web. While a blog post may be part of an ongoing dialog, that dialog is more often with posts elsewhere than with preceding and succeeding posts in the same blog. They construct their context through embedded URLs, not adjacent posts or hierarchy. While most blogs list several posts on a homepage, posts usually have their own individual pages.

In line with the above, blog posts tend to emphasize their relationship with time. Post and update times are prominent (especially considering the lack of other form elements). Posts can be updated, even days or weeks later, but it is considered bad etiquette to do so without making clear what has changed. Blog posts are ordered by time; some bloggers even use dates as titles.

Forum posts give a lot of visual space to the identity of the poster. Blog homepages tend to include this, but it is often absent or downplayed. This is presumably because forum posts are surrounded by posts by other people, but I still find the stress on identity and status striking.

From a technical perspective, I would like to see Moodle forum posts included become more like blog posts - first-class entities with unique URLs - because this is one of the requirements for working with many of the exciting technologies being developed. In general, I think the long-run benefits of this approach - exposing URLs, by consuming them (most Moodle objects are identified by internal ID numbers rather than URLs), leveraging semantic mark-up - will become overwhelming. Though at the moment, that would be putting the cart before the horse (technology before utility).

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by David Scotson - Friday, 26 August 2005, 5:19 PM

I just wanted to say:

microformats: yay! I'd not seen anything about forum/blog posts but stuff I'd looked at previously (identity, calendar and reviews stuff) is very interesting.
you can link to individual Moodle posts if you know how, though it isn't exposed to the casual user e.g your post is:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338#1390030

I got that by clicking reply and then stealing the id from the URL. Now that I've replied to your post you can do it more easily by clicking Show parent in my post. I'm not sure if this should be done (is the topic more important than the individual post?) but it currently it can if you know how.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Geoffrey Glass - Saturday, 27 August 2005, 3:14 AM

I'm going a bit off topic here...

You're right about the link. The problem is, because it includes the discussion ID it's not permanent - it breaks if the post is moved to another discussion (something an administrator can do). I had to resolve this in annotation by creating a proxy link which redirects to the appropriate discussion. Also, the fragment identifier (following the #) is illegal because it starts with a digit (don't ask me why that's the rule). I prefixed it with an "m" in annotation to resolve this.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by D.I. von Briesen - Thursday, 8 September 2005, 8:10 AM

Boy- that was a REALLY long, dense discussion. I'll keep it short and sweet.

Why not give the blog "owner" the ability to "split" discussions the way teachers can with a forum? If it's hijacked or off-track, can be moved elsewhere, or deleted by the blog owner.

I really want to see blogs built in soon, as they are key to my plans for every student writing essentially a journal of activity - but unlike moodle's earlier journal, I want dates (timestamps?) and a little more richness (like ability for others to read). As another poster commented, a blog is owned whereas a forum is simply participated in... (scuz the danglin' preposition).

d.i.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Michael Tanczos - Wednesday, 14 September 2005, 10:30 PM

Easy solution(?):

Use a standard forum and add new posting methods. The concept is that a poster may create a new thread, and only that poster may "reply" to the root level post. This sets up the blog ability. Then one posting method allows users to reply to any of those posts. Another method disallows that. Then blog forums are just like everything else.. just pick a different posting method.

The presentation logic may need to differ but it may not matter all that much.

I used this approach on gamedev.net to implement an ungodly number of features all based out of forums as a core. This just describes the blog component and it has worked pretty well. We have about 2.6 million posts in our forum database.

---
Michael Tanczos

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by D.I. von Briesen - Saturday, 17 September 2005, 1:49 PM

Michael:
I do like the simplicity of your solution. I suppose the other thing that normal blogs have is the personalization (again ownership) of the thread... so it wouldn't address that - but it would get the job done, and I could just make a forum at the top of the course called Student Blogs... (presuming such a change were made to the forums module)

d.i.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Des Walsh - Wednesday, 26 October 2005, 2:08 PM

I'm new here and was intending to just lurk for a while but I really have to say I find this discussion quite fascinating. And the recurring thought I had as I read it through is that I can think of a whole bunch of bloggers, some of them full time professional bloggers, who would love to read and pitch into this discussion. That would be easier if it was in a blog

A challenge with this sort of rich and nuanced discussion on a forum such as this, not on a blog, is that the courtesies I and others observe elsewhere mean that I can't quote from or refer to this in any of my blogs, because it is a private discussion (however large the group is it is not the whole blogosphere).

I do understand the challenge of 'mixing' discussions across a forum and a blog. I belong to a forum of professional bloggers who are also contributors to a group blog. There seems to be a tendency for subjects which the initiator sees as more in-group than of wider interest to be introduced on the forum rather than on the blog and contrariwise. If such a discussion on the forum starts to look like a useful blog post for a wider readership, someone offers or is encouraged to post on it on the group blog or on one of their own blogs, with the group's agreement (which can be a time-determined non-dissent form of agreement). Might sound a bit messy, but it is working in a group of about 20.

I would hope the discussion stays open. 'What a blog is' is surely an evolving concept. With Technorati tracking 14.2 million weblogs as of August, can any of us say with total confidence 'what a blog is' or 'what blogs are about' or 'what blogs will be (or not be)'?

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Respecting the culture and design idea

by Teemu Leinonen - Sunday, 30 October 2005, 6:31 PM

All different kind of coordination, cooperation, collaboration and co-construction tools carries with them a culture of use. The culture is socially constructed by the designers and the users of the tools. New design iterations then try to support the culture build around it to make it even better.

Moodle Forums culture of use is a sub-culture of the online discussion tradition. There are features that remind us of mailing lists and early web bulleting boards. As such the Moodle forums is one of the best online discussion forums. Still it is not a very good tool for co-construction

So what is the culture of use of blogs then? Blog is a tool for writing public but personal notes about things the authors have found interesting. Blog is primary not a discussion, collaboration or co-construction tool. Blog is a publishing tool.

Bringing blogs beside the forums inside Moodle would make sense if the purpose of the Moodle blogs would be to make it possible for the users to write public but personal notes about things the authors have found interesting. This is the culture of use of blogs and we should respect it.

In the field of educational technology there is a lot of interest to use blogs for portfolios. Again, I do not believe that one can overcome the culture of use and make it something else.

What blog kind of tool inside Moodle would then make sense?

I am proposing a simple teachers course blog where teachers can easily inform students in one place in public about the up coming events in the course. No commenting but trackbacks and RSS. To the course blog teachers should be able to add links to the Forum discussion and this way pull students to take part in them. The RSS-feeds would make it easy for students to follow the blog.

Actually this is the way we implemented blog tool to our Fle3 (http://fle3.uiah.fi), although we do not have discussion Forums but Knowledge Building tool inside Fle3.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Matt Crosslin - Saturday, 19 November 2005, 5:28 AM

From what I understand, you are looking for a way for a student, user, etc, to be able to reply to Blogs or Forums in a simplified manner, allowing other users/readers to follow the train of thought if the student decide to change formats (from Forum -> Blog).

This may have already been suggested, but what about making this reply box (the one I am currently typing in) the reply box for forums or blogs. Then you have more than one submit button at the bottom.

"Submit as forum response" or "Submit as new blog entry"

If you choose the blog entry option, Moodle could still put a foum post in there that has a note that says something like "I have created a blog entry to respond to this post. Click here to read it." Then, in the blog entry, have the php generate a statement after the post that says something like "This blog post was a response to ____ forum. Click here to read that forum."

You could even design it to where the post box has a copy of the text from the forum post that you are replying to already pasted in it as a quoteblock.

This way, you wouldn't really need any extra database cells to track it, php would generate the cross links and the cross posts.

You could also have some check boxes that allow the person posting to pick who sees the post.

Then, if some one decides to reply to the blog post, they could also have a check box on the reply page for the blog that says "Insert this reply into the original Forum discussion thread." Just use a simple php IF statement, basically, if ($forumreply = 'y') echo "Insert this reply...";

So, you would need two extra cells in the blog database, one for a simple y/n to "forum reply", and another to store the forum number that it was a reply to.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Matt Crosslin - Monday, 21 November 2005, 10:55 PM

Also, if you wanted a way to view all of the posts/blog responses to a single topic, you could use two methods:
- Use the same mouse over effect that the calendar uses to show responses in a blog. ex "Hold your mouse here to read the blog entry reply to this one." I don't know how that effect may work on a long response though, or how you would view comments. Just an idea. Maybe you can use it to show a "preview" so a user can read if they want to click further or not.
- Use two frames (either iframes or frameset) to view the discussion. The one on the left is the main discussion forum, and when you come to a notice that there was a response in a blog entry, you click on the link and it appears on the right side of the screen, and you can read the post and the comments in that window. Or jump to another discussion thread if the discussion also leads there.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Bill Click - Thursday, 24 November 2005, 1:53 AM

It seems to me that a blog is nothing more than a personal journal that you allow others to view. Is this too simplistic an idea? I have always hated that journal seems to have gone away into assignment. Seems that the journal would fit into your scheme of things with the ability of a blog. But like I said, this may be too simplistic a view for such a large subject.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Gavin Stokes - Friday, 2 December 2005, 4:38 PM

The simple ideas are often the best Bill!
To me, a blog seems much closer to a journal than a forum. I'd settle for a Journal with support for multiple entries (allowing sorting by date), support for images and other attachments and some publishing controls. Voila - basic blog.

By all means develop a grand blog module, I suspect though that an extended, publishable journal would suit many people.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by João Fernandes - Saturday, 10 December 2005, 2:19 AM

I think blogs can be used in 3 major ways:

A space for a democratic public discourse
A diary
a CMS like some sites refered in this thread

A blog is more about empowering individual users to talk about them, their toughts, their opinions, their this, their that.. And this is not self centered, because is more than a diary, because you show it to the world (well, it can be totally private if anyone reads it ;)) and people can confront you, and more than that, they get to know new perspectives and construct something new over it. I belive the quality of communication and thought is incremental.

Personal vs Social

I believe blogs can be an interesting enhancement to moodle, as the social constructionist framework needs this single, multi-dimensional user, and his thoughts, ideas, reflexions, to empower the whole. I believe too that moodle is somewhat ignoring the user by not providing him his space. The my moodle page, as it is referred on the #1 moodle newsletter, could be more than a BB my page, and I would like to propose a model for this. Please feel free to comment.
Check it here. Just translated it from portuguese to english to help things up ;)

This approach of blogs can be the beginning of a more conscious awareness of the user in a moodle all-social environment and I think it is a good way to start.

Interface

I imagine blogs in moodle as individual pages directly connected to courses and personal pages, maybe using the tab scheme (a good solution to make complexity simple):

The blog could be activated in the course settings with a dropdown box "Course Blog" (Enabled/Disabled) and maybe the order of the tabs could be changeable. Each student could have his own blog inside each course? and each blog could talk about a specific subject of the course' program.

Categorization and private/open is a must, probably co-authoring (Groups in moodle course's should have their own page) and moderation, and probably a new feature, something like a "my block", a floating block that accompanies the user wherever he is (see a discussion about a floating block here by Josep Fontana), that allows a personal blog to be feeded anywhere. This floating block could also have something like Michael Penney's my files block, to allow submission of files to assignments, linking to resources and activities etc.. but this is another discussion.

Uses

Like I said in the beginning of this post, you can use blogs in your personal area like a diary or on a public democratic discourse, even to build your site, and in courses to build the course site, to spread a particular course subject, or of course, as a group or individual blog, moderated by the teacher.

Hope this helps
João

PS - here's a interesting document about blogs (PDF, 1.45 MB)

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Sharon Peters - Sunday, 11 December 2005, 6:10 AM

Wow! This is a fascinating set of discussions and probably represents some of the best thinking I have seen yet on this important topic.

As a high school teacher who has introduced both blogs and a moodle into my teaching practices this year, I have been able to witness the differences between these two learning environments and I think it can be summed up in the one notion of user control. A blog affords a great deal more user control - over the appearance, the layout, the design, etc. - of its area than the moodle environment. This is an important feature and not to be underestimated in its power in learning.

I have already posted some of my thoughts on the do's and don'ts of blogging on my own blog about ed. tech. musings which I will readily credit to the inspiration of James Farmer's material on how-not-to-use blogs in education and how-to-use-blogs in education. He also has posted a fascinating paper which is a conference proposal titled Blogs @ Anywhere: High Fidelity online Communication.

Also, I am just completing a grad. level course in ed. tech. called "Social Computing". As one of the course projects, each student had to maintain a blog. Most of the students hosted their blog on the university server which crashed from reaching its limit of bandwidth in the middle of November. The instructor had to ask us to move our "blog" discussions to our FirstClass course area. The quality and quantity of the "blog" postings quickly plummeted. It's just not the same....

Social computing tools are evolving rapidly. The good thing is that educators now have a wealth of tools available to them for almost any of the learning objectives that we set. As in any good instructional design, we state our learning objectives first, then choose the best tool that will offer the best support for our learning objectives.

Kudos to moodle for being there to offer a really terrific online learning environment. My moodle area has given me the most satisfaction of all the tools that I have used to support my students. Currently, my moodle is supporting over 190 students from around the world who are collaborating on four different projects representing six different schools from five different countries.

However, will moodle ever be able to support a true blog - I am guessing no. You can call it what you want but it will not be a true blogging environment. I would prefer that we drop the blog idea and give it another more appropriate name, such as moo-blog, or something that is more hybrid-like, because the eventual module will likely have to be a kind of hybrid.

Sharon Peters

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Ger Tielemans - Sunday, 11 December 2005, 7:11 PM

Reflection, reflection, reflection: no human learning without reflection. When you learn to ride a bike, then there is no reflection: it is just good old operant conditioning. (check: what is the first thing you do when you want to turn to the right? wrong answer!!)

Arrangement, arrangement, powerful visual educational arrangement, that is the gold of Moodle:

Blogs invite you to publish random thoughts, organised by day, no reflection, no human learning, tomorrow another fresh appealing idea. (show me a blogsystem that does not follow/promotes that pattern, some Wordpress blogs, but then it are the summaries of experts in some fields, publishing stand alone pearls, after years of growing in the shells of their brains).. When VLE's don't inspire students, desperate teachers try blogs.. but where is the reflection, where is the connection with the educational arrangement. Maybe embedded blogs can get an educational life, but not without a strong context.
Wiki's are NOT JUST for publishing webpages, despite the succes of Wikipedia. It are places to construct/collect knowledge, share views, make interconnections, restructure knowledge-trees alone or together, structured thoughts are the core of Wiki, not oneliners..
Moodle offers educational wiki's in different flavours: privat wiki's, group wiki's and class wiki's. Wiki's have lots of tools to help persons or groups to manage this process: that's why you have page history and built-in refrence mechnism, etc. "Just for publishing webpages", what a mistake.
Good old dialogue was - and is - the best tool to make an invitation to reflect in privat on a set of tasks in a section and to get a private overview of all your course-related reflections by using the breadcrumb button
sharing and commenteing on ideas and uttered reflections: forums forums forums

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Paula de Waal - Monday, 19 December 2005, 1:01 AM

I will try to be brief...

Portfolio

I have been using a separate course in moodle as process and learning portfolio, where the students have "teacher" profiles so that they can collect links and artefacts from many courses and give the discourse a personalized format. They can choose the authoring tools as well. The idea of being able to collect, comment and reflect about other content produced in many courses is the most important feature of the portfolio as a metacognition tool. In short, i would like to have the following improvements in moodle:

1- students able to collect posts and other artefacts from manay courses into a portfolio
2- the possibility to define and keep a version of the portfolio on a certain date if the portfolio is an official assessment tool (for certification purposes)
3- the possibility to leave the choice to the student to publish their portfolio after assessment (second version?) on the web or exporting it into a portable format

Blogs

Blogs are not to be confounded with portfolios, they have a taxonomical structure usefull to organizing collections of articles and/or comments, repository-like logic. They are close to diaries and can be included in a portfolio but they have no sequence-logical structures usefull to autoreflexion and other activities related to portfolios.
I use forums like blogs if the activities are simply based on authorship, note taking or narrating reflexive processes - one thread per student. If blogs are to be seen as complex activities such as collaborative e-publishing, than it would have a sense to have it opened to the world! In this case, we dont need to export forum messages to a blog but we could use some sort of aggregation mechanism to import blog posts into moodle forums with the status of "citation", for example.

cheers

Paula de Waal

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by B. Gültekin Çetiner - Monday, 19 December 2005, 5:48 PM

Hi Paula,

I think it is good idea to assign the students as teachers to some courses so that we can treat these courses as e-portfolios. But I share my quiz questions throughout my courses. What would happen to these shared quiz questions, if students change them? Any idea for this?

Thanks a lot

Gültekin

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by John Stimpson - Wednesday, 11 January 2006, 10:10 PM

Im not sure whether this has already been said but I see blogs in moodle being used mostly for reflection and 'diary-esk'

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Ian Usher - Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 1:20 AM

just putting my tuppence-worth in... I'm with you on how good Dialogue was (he said, pining for a Mythical golden Age of Moodling tongueout ). I know what the messaging system's for, but I really think the dialogue was Something Else... ask Drew Buddie if you want someone passionate about it!

Like many others have said, this discussion is one of the best I've seen on this topic. Anywhere.

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Sarah Quantick - Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 5:04 AM

I am working to introduce Moodle to my School as our VLE it is really taking off with students however we need to keep up the momentum. We have already decided student blogs are our next move and e-portfolios for september for all students. We have learning coaches at present and would loke to provide e-mentoring either by peers or teachers.

Any tips or advice on making moodle the whole package would be greatly appreciated

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Re: Blogs: Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

by Miles Berry - Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 5:56 AM

There are, I'm sure, going to be some exciting developments within Moodle to address this, but you might also be interested in exploring the work being done to integrate Moodle and Elgg, which provides both blogging and some form of e-portfolio. If you can cope with the technical details, have a glance at Penny Leach's progress report from this morning. I can't get over how much the NZ team have achieved with this.

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