Thinking and Writing Wrinkles: : "This weblog project is a log of the learning journey combining a group of ESL students and their native-speaking classmates in an elementary school. Students will collaboratively develop their abilities as speakers, listeners, readers, writers and thinkers using weblogs to write about topics of interest to them."
Posts
Showing posts from October, 2003
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O'Reilly Network: What We're Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002] :
"Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at. "
"When the Web began, the page was the de facto unit of measurement, and content was formatted accordingly. ...as the Web has matured, we've developed our own native format for writing online, a format that moves beyond the page paradigm: The weblog, with its smaller, more concise, unit of measurement; and the post, which utilizes the medium to its best advantage by proffering frequent updates and richly hyperlinked text. "
"What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it's the reverse-chronological or
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Online Learning Update
"Self-publishing tools are gradually finding their place in the Web mainstream...today these resources enjoy more attention than ever. This is in part due to the growing community of "bloggers": people who regularly post commentary to personal Web pages, usually targeting a particular readership. Blogging is making headlines as a powerful means of exposing socio-political issues (Shachtman, 2002; Reynolds, 2003) and as a mode of self-expression; in Iran, for example, blogging technology was viewed as capable of threatening national security and led to the arrest and imprisonment of a journalist (Delio, 2003). Other uses of blogging in online publishing have been described by Downes in articles (2000, 2003a) prior to his current Technology Source piece (2003b). In recent months, Penn State University's DEOS mailing list has been humming with observations about blogging's educational impact, and a new variant of the blog—known as a "
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My comments: I've not been blogging much here lately because all of my classes have been starting up and that's taking up most of my time, although I have been blogging with them (surprise surprise), so I'll start posting the URL's and my comments up here before long.
One thing I will say, is that I have now got the introductory Blog class down to a fine art after doing it four times. It (obviously) takes more time with lower level learners, but a 90-minute class is ideal to get everything done. Here are some tips:
a) I take the class to a computer room and show them a couple of example blogs
b) I tell them that they're going to set up their own, individual (student) blogs and go to Blogger
c) They set up their blog and post and publish an introduction
d) Then I show them how to change the settings and ask them to invite me and one or two of their classmates to their blog.
e) If we have time, they accept the invitation and post to their classmates' b