Our ABC Blook on Blogging

Check out the ABC Blook on Blogging, brought to you by the Wrinkles Weblog Group

British Council Bloggers

Finally, blogging has become a popular feature of British Council websites.

After some previous trials, the British Council Glasgow conference for teachers (taking place this week) has four teachers blogging their observations and summaries of the presentations they attend (Sorry, but these sites are only available to British Council staff via their intranet), using typepad. This could become a regular feature of conference events - it's certainly a good way to bring the conference to those teachers who can't attend. It's true there are few comments to the posts on the weblog, but then a lot of teachers will be on holiday at the moment.

I also found out that the Britsh Council community for exisitng students (Global Village, again not available to non-BC staff) is also to introduce weblogs to help improve the participation by students in this site. This is an interesting development as I proposed it when I was taking the excellent e-moderators course in September last year, for British Council Global Village moderators to improve their skills.

How effective these projects are remains to be seen, but the increase in blogging activity is certainly of interest for edu-bloggers who believe using weblogs hold a great deal of promise with both students and teachers.

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

"In this study, reading performance with four white space layouts was compared. Margins surrounding the text and leading (space between lines) were manipulated to generate the four white space conditions. Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text."

trAce Online Writing Centre - Opinion

trAce Online Writing Centre - Opinion:

"To call blogs literature would be to turn them into an elitist, edited, and vetted art, one which is contrary to their very nature. The complexity of what blogs and their reactionary, perfectly contemporary, accessible prose could mean to the future of sustainable storytelling, to truth in journalism and to the survival of democracy, is too great to call literature."

Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education :

Will Richardson's Power Point presentation can be found at this link: Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education The presentation provides a well-developed introduction to weblogs in education.

E-Portfolios for Learning

Helen Barrett's E-Portfolios for Learning Blog was set up to discuss "ideas on electronic portfolios to support lifelong learning"

E-portfolios and weblogging

The paperCreation of a learning landscape: weblogging and social networking in the context of e-portfolios by Ben Werdmuller of the University of Edinburgh argues that for the 'e-portfolio' system to be effective it needs to capture the enthusiam of online leraner and tutors. As learning is not a solitary pursuit, one way that this can happen is to learn from social networks such as Orkut, and weblogging communities (livejournal being the example given). The learning experience, the paper argues, is enhanced and made more valuable by the participation and interaction of others.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.