Using blogs, wikis and Blackboard to enhance the in-class experience

Time: Fall 2004.

Setting: St. Kate’s, Blackboard, Lotus Notes for email.

►Graduate program in which classes meet either once per week for three hours

OR once every other week (more or less) for 5 hours.

Students rarely are on campus outside of class.

Using Blackboard or email for group work or online discussion was tedious and frustrating because

Situation 1: A student practicum, summer 2005.

Practicum was off-campus; neither of us wanted to use Blackboard or email in order to communicate. Project consisted of setting up an online system and cataloging a small library for a non-profit organization, then writing an extended paper that discussed methods, approach, etc. However, the paper really should be based on week-to-week decisions, large and small. So…

We decided to use a blog

→ The student could post comments anytime and the comments could contain practically any sort of information: musings, decisions, links to the online system, etc.

→ Either of us could post or comment on each other’s posts AND the blog indexed those posts. Also, all of the comments could be archived and rendered “private” so no one else had access to them.

A bit of personal philosophy.

By the way, this is the point of my talk.

+

→

With all this in mind…

Fall 2005

I had one other concern.

Did you ever have the situation where some students came to class unprepared to discuss the assigned readings?

What did you do?

Better learning experience Discussion yada yada yada important You will get a lot more out of the class and the assignment if you come prepared	Class participation is a large part of the grade Failure to prepare the readings and to discuss them will lower your grade In fact you’ll fail this course and drop out of school and end up joining a survivalist group in Idaho

Let’s try better living through technology.

I asked students to respond on the class blog to a question or statement that I put forth about the readings due for that day. The statement usually was a combination of detail and integration (for example: on p. nnn Smith says “….” In the context of the other readings, how do you evaluate…)

Sometimes the question was the central one to all readings; in other cases, it was meant as a “lead-in” to further in-class discussion. The point was, of course, that for students to make an intelligent post, they would have had do the readings and think about them.

Students could post their individual responses or could comment on responses of other students.

I structured each class discussion a little differently, depending on where I thought the discussion should go and how it should get there, but I usually used some combination of these techniques:

Posting is not hard to do…I created a 1-page handout that showed students how to log in the blog and how to index their postings. They figured out the rest—the software really is quite intuitive, at least for fairly straightforward text.

Here’s an example of an assignment with excerpts from some postings responding to the assignment.

LIS 772: Academic Librarianship

Winter 2006

Assignment 11, due 4/11: Librarians, paraprofessionals

There are three parts to the assignment, each identified by ►

► Please read Budd, chapter 11 (The academic librarian)

and the article:

► Oberg, Larry R. “The library of the 21st century.” OLA Quarterly v. 5 no. 4. (available online through Library Literature)

In class we’ll discuss the history of the academic librarian, look more closely at the relationships the academic librarian forms in the community, consider the relationships between librarians and paraprofessionals, discuss why the issue of faculty status has been such a contested issue, sum up these discussions in the context of internal governance, and then look beyond to external influences on the life and work of the academic librarian.

► To prepare for one critical part of this discussion, please post a short response to the following question on the class blog after you have read the Budd and Oberg above:

Is there a parallel between how librarians treat staff and how faculty treat librarians?

Here are some assertions/questions to ponder, but you don’t have to respond to explicitly (you can find these scattered throughout the literature). As you formulate your response, consider the ethical dimensions of your judgments.

· Librarians shouldn’t be faculty because they don’t teach and they don’t have the [research] doctorate.

· Paraprofessionals shouldn’t do the work of librarians because paraprofessionals lack the MLS

· Calling someone without the MLS a librarian undercuts the profession

· Paraprofessionals shouldn’t do the work of librarians because to do so would be exploitation of the paraprofessionals (extended responsibility but without the recognition, pay, or status).

· What is the difference between the work of a librarian and a paraprofessional?

· The term “paraprofessional” is demeaning. We’re professionals too!

· What bearing does gender have on this discussion?

Please tag your response under

assignment 11 (librarians/paraprofessionals)

→ I would appreciate your posting a response by Sunday night—I’d like to visit your postings and offer some comments then. Monday or Tuesday, please have another look (and respond to postings already there) and we’ll be primed for class discussion.

Excerpts from some postings (used with permission):

While several others have made good points about parallels between how faculty treat librarians and how librarians treat paraprofessionals, the words into action idea pointed out by David really strikes a chord with me. In today’s climate, most people (not all!) have learned how to “talk the talk.” But how many follow through with their actions? Librarians may speak about respect for paraprofessionals, but what are they doing to show that respect? Giving raises (ha)? Soliciting their input on library-wide decisions (maybe)? Allowing them the time and budget allocation for professional development (possibly)? Perhaps in most libraries paraprofessionals really are treated with respect, even if their spheres of influence and expertise are different from librarians.

As someone else asked, though, what about when they are the same? Should paraprofessionals be paid the same as a librarian if they are doing the same work? (Perhaps a better question is why would they be doing the same work - seems like a library administration problem.) If so, what’s the use in getting an MLIS degree? If not, why? …

I view the Oberg article with a jaundiced eye. That is because I have lived long enough to be able to separate fact from fantasy. The author spills much ink about how important the paraprofessionals are, how they need and deserve recognition, blah, blah, blah. The bottom line is this: every profession has its peon class that does the heavy lifting. Doctors have nurses, lawyers have legal clerks, businessmen have secretaries. The whole reason that my fellow students and I are in library school is so that we don’t have to do all those crummy, low paying jobs, like emptying out the book bins and schlepping carts around the floor and having to listen to whiney patrons about how the book they thought was on hold for them is now halfway across town on its way to another library. Once we get our MLIS, some other poor slob is going to be doing that crap. Instead of being overworked and underpaid, we will merely be underpaid… Not to put too fine a point on all this, but I think Oberg is just tryin to pull our chains. As Budd himself states on page 249 of his book: “…some individuals may articulate certain opinions because they believe that is what others want to hear.”…

Do parallels exist between the way librarians treat support staff and the way librarians are treated by faculty? Yes. While no hierarchy may exist on paper in some cases, the stratification is apparent – just observe the way people interact. But the answer really isn’t so simple in my experience. When the people involved understand that they each have an area of expertise then they do interact without outwardly displaying any sense of superiority. I asked one of my co-workers (a librarian) if he felt inferior to the faculty he works with, all of whom have a Ph.D. He said that he did not because he knows how to do his job, he is good at it, and because he isn’t a frustrated academic: he is a librarian because he wants to be a librarian. When I observe him dealing with faculty members, they act as equals, as professionals (which is what I would expect). As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “no man can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

But I also think Brendan was correct in his characterization of librarians as territorial – having spent the time, money, and effort on an advanced degree, why would someone give up the “status” that accompanies an MLIS and consider themselves an equal of someone who does not have the degree? People are prone to look for ways to differentiate themselves from others as a means of finding a place within a given group – and holding up a degree is the way to do this in the academic world. Therefore the relationship between librarians and faculty could be in some part based on the “who has the ‘highest’ degree” contest, in the same way that people might compare equivalent degrees based on where those degrees were earned (Harvard outranking Winona State, for example).

With regard to David’s questions (and I’ll demur on the question of the meaning of respect), I think librarians use the degree as a symbol of expertise – it gives them the right to make decisions of consequence for the library: collection development, structuring the database/OPAC, offering instruction (as faculty would), making decisions about how the library operates, etc.

Some technical matters about blog management.

Note especially the following:

Also note: this is from the blog manager viewpoint, not the student view

For me, the point wasn’t fancy formatting, but, rather, a place for students to comment on readings, and, by so doing, be better prepared for class discussion.

Bottom line:

It worked.

Discussion.

I’m spending a lot of time on blogs since for me this was a “gateway” both practically and intellectually to ways to enhance the in-class experience.

What does the literature say?

First, just to get definitions down:

“A weblog is therefore a website with a certain collection of distinctive features. In 2005 these features generally include:

* Automatic formatting of content in the form of "headlines," followed by "entries," or "stories"

* Time- and date-stamp of entries

* Archiving of past entries

* A search function to search through all entries

* A "blogroll" - a list of other blogs read by the author(s) of the current blog

* A section associated with each entry where readers can post comments on the entry

* Simple syndication of the site content via RSS (Really Simple Syndication)”

--Martindale, Trey. Using weblogs in scholarship and teaching. Tech Trends 49:1 (2005) p. 55- accessed online 5/20/06 through ProQuest

Second, why do blogs seem to “work?”

For my students, the blogs offered a clear advantage over discussion forums because the blogs had greater sense of permanence. Discussion forums are usually inaccessible after a particular course has concluded, particularly if one is using a proprietary course management system like Blackboard or WebCT. I encouraged the students to continue blogging beyond the course, thereby building a collection of resources for current and future IDT students.”

--Martindale 2005, my emphasis

“Weblogging seems like such a potentially rich set of online writing activities because it is relatively low-tech compared to producing hypertext or websites, and it incorporates familiar writing skills like summary, paraphrases, and the development of voice.”

--Krause, Steven D. Blogs as a tool for teaching. Chronicle Review, 6/24/05, accessed 5/20/06 through ProQuest. my emphasis

Third: A very interesting article…

Herring, Susan C., Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright. Women and children last: the discursive construction of weblogs. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved May 21, 2004 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_andchildren.html

…discusses blogging and gender, and concludes, in part,

“…the blogs featured in contemporary public discourses about blogging are the exception, rather than the rule: all the available evidence suggests that blogs are more commonly a vehicle of personal expression than a means of filtering content on the Web, for all demographic groups including adult males. It follows that more attention needs to be paid to “typical” blogs and the people who create them in order to understand the real motivations, gratifications, and societal effects of this growing practice. This would require advancing a broader conception of weblogs that takes into account the activities of diverse blog authors, considering personal journaling as a human, rather than exclusively a gendered or age-related activity, and conducting research on weblogs produced by women and teens, both for their inherent interest and to determine what differences, if any, exist among groups of bloggers.

The authors were reacting to much of the scholarly literature on blogs that focuses on “filter blogs” rather than the more common “journal” blogs (such as the one I used), and, interestingly, that literature 1) is for the most part written by males; 2) as are filter blogs; 3) which are much more highly “privileged” in this literature.

Finally, skimming some other articles suggested

1. There is not much real hard-and-fast information, in part (my guess) since blogging has been popular only for a few years (though around in some form for nearly a decade) and really not mainstream among faculty (though it is among students, especially younger students). That caveat aside,

2. Some articles likened blogs to journaling and, also, journalism: fairly quick, informal posts or responses, but that could cumulate over time.

3. One writer noted that fuzzy, open-ended assignments were no more effective in the blogosphere than anywhere else.

4. Students are more likely to create their own posts than comment on previous posts. HOWEVER, as you saw in my blog, posts often comment on other posts anyway.

Why this look at the literature?

►To see if my hunches were confirmed/denied by others, and to see if there were other creative uses of blogs that I could appropriate for my situation.

Some useful sites:

"Into the Blogosphere" (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/) is a collection of essays on the nature of blog communication.

BROG Project (Blog Research on Genre, http://www.blogninja.com/)

Blogtalk (http://blogtalk.net/) is in its third year as a conference about blog research.

a significant collection of blog research:

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/categories/ weblogResearch/index.html

Wikis

My site:

http://www.stkate.edu/mlis-tiki/tiki-index.php

I didn’t have too much more to say about wikis than blogs, except that wikis allow true collaboration:

From the literature:

“A wiki is a set of related webpages that can be authored collectively, typically without special log-on or password entry. The authoring occurs in the web browser through the display of simple mark-up language…”

“In a course setting, a wiki provides a collaborative workspace that can display documents immediately with a minimal working knowledge of HTML tags. Changes to the documents are made through "live edit" in the browser window on the Internet. By contrast, a collectively authored document in a CMS setting requires saving, uploading, and other transfer of the file among student-authors. The wiki's function cannot be duplicated among students in the course CMS although it can be achieved in slightly different format by instructors and teaching assistants enrolled in a Blackboard course shell…”

“Research has indicated that students adapt quickly to coweb technology and appreciate the opportunity to collaborate asynchronously..”

“Collaborative work through blogs moves learning from instructor-centered to student-centered (Oravec, 2003); wikis hold the same promise. Just as some University instructors have found blogs superior to class discussion boards (Quible, 2005), their use of wikis may improve upon current techniques to generate collaboration and web publishing.”

Bold, Mary. Use of Wikis in Graduate Course Work.  Journal of Interactive Learning Research. Charlottesville: 2006.Vol.17, Iss. 1;  pg. 5, 10 pgs. Accessed 5/20/06 through ProQuest

[just a note: there doesn’t seem to be as much scholarly literature on wikis as on blogs, but this may be a mis-impression, since the standard education indexes don’t have a subject heading for wikis yet!]

So, let’s look at an example from one of my cataloging classes.

This was a project to compile and categorize a list of free-floating subdivisions. What this means: When catalogers create subject headings in the standard online system, they choose basic terms from a list of terms authorized by the Library of Congress (there are about 235,000 of these at last count). However, some items need more specific headings. One way to achieve this specificity it to add standard terms (subdivisions) to these basic heading terms. This list of subdivisions also is authorized by the Library of Congress. However, there actually are several lists, each for different purposes (subdivisions authorized for topical terms, names of people, names of places, and so on). There is no one convenient master list, and the separate lists are quite long (several hundred terms each) and are only alphabetical. So if a cataloger wants to use a subdivision, she/he has to scan these alphabetical lists. This is not very efficient, especially for new catalogers. Hence one of our class projects was to create larger categories and organize these subdivisions conceptually rather than just alphabetically.

Is this more than you ever wanted to know about cataloging? If not, come visit us at the St. Kate’s LIS graduate program!

Here is an excerpt from the combined collaborative document:

Free-floating subdivisions

Last update: 2-27-06

Category	Subdivision	Notes
Actions	Abstracting and indexing Accidents – Investigation Auditing Authorship Grading Field work Inspection Management Maintenance and repair Marketing Planning Practice Repairing
Art	Illustrations In art Influence
Buildings see Structures
Education	Ability testing Accreditation Archival resources Computer-assisted instruction Curricula Early works to 1800 Evaluation Examinations Examinations – Study guides Grading Interactive media Methodology Outlines, syllabi, etc. Scholarships, fellowships, etc. Study and teaching Study and teaching--Activity programs Study and teaching--Audio-visual aids Study and teaching--Simulation methods [Many more study and teaching subheadings] Study guides Textbooks Vocational guidance
Entertainment	Caricatures and cartoons Comic books, strips, etc. Computer games
Events	Accidents Anniversaries Awards Calendars Centennial celebrations Competitions Exhibitions Heraldry Study and teaching…

Using the wiki sure beats creating and combining multiple word documents (that was our first pass). However, the wiki can’t take complicated formatting, so although you CAN create tables, etc., the best way to do this is to edit in word, transfer to HTML, copy the HTML into the wiki. You can edit the HTML directly in the wiki, but if you’re not up to that, you have to copy back into a Word document, edit, and then upload.

The alternative is to do simpler formatting that will work directly on the wiki.

There are MANY other uses of Wikis, since users can edit, link, and comment.

► For example, another student, in an independent study, created a host of wiki pages, with each linking to its logical “neighbors” and all linked to the main page, as a way of creating a “document” that provided multiple intellectual perspectives on an interdisciplinary topic. This wiki conceptually is akin to a website, however, since the individual pages are highly text-based, it made more sense to create a wiki than a true web page. Also, I was able to comment directly on her documents, or add comments beneath (in the “comments” section of the wiki, and, just as with the blog, we could keep a running conversation of comments to each other).

Again, my purpose was to enhance the classroom experience, and it worked: students did the assignment, but also saw what other students were doing, and we all came to class ready to discuss the entire project rather than tackle it piece by piece in class.

So this is another handy tool if time is of the essence…

Websites.

What??? What are websites doing in this presentation? You didn’t say anything about websites!

The point here simply is to mention the utility of a website as a presentation medium and as an interactive medium compared to the paper, and, for a class presentation, offering the website prior to the presentation and having it open during the presentation makes for a more invigorating (though perhaps more diffuse) in-class discussion.

Finally,

Blackboard

Blackboard is Course Management Software (CMS), though the newest version(s) now are incorporating blog-like and wiki-like features.

For my classes, I have used BB to

- post assignments

- post answers to exercises

- post syllabi and other course-related material, including reading lists

- collect assignments electronically

- return assignments electronically

- post announcements related to the course

- email members of the class (at an email address they’re likely to check)

► Notice that all of this is really one-way communication, and that’s what a CMS really was designed for.

►I have found the blog and wiki far superior to the Blackboard (or Web CT) discussion board: less maintenance on my part, much easier to follow conversations and threads, and encourages more interactive and “responsive” thinking than the traditional discussion board.

However, one useful feature of blackboard is the option for students to post papers that other students in the class are assigned to read. Blackboard can accept any format, so this allows a fair amount of creativity on the part of students for their project.

Alas, after the semester is over, all this goes poof.

So…

The next step:

This will promote (I hope) student interaction across classes for students that share similar interests. It also will serve (I hope) a way for students in a particular class to see the quality of work their colleagues are doing, and for students in future classes to be inspired by that quality of work.

Tune in next year to see how this works out!

DL may 06