Blogging about blogging

This week has seen us busy installing the OU blog and fashioning it to our whims. I am sorry to say, but the standard Moodle blog was not quite good enough for our learning platform where students from various geographic, cognitive and linguistic backgrounds gather. The checkbox linking a blog post to a specific course was not robust. The pathways to finding posts of fellow participants were cloudy.

The OU blog plug-in developed by Open University promises improvement. It offers personal and course blogs, different access control levels, and a simple activity link to the relevant blog posts. So let me leave it to Renaat to settle the remaining technical issues of ousting Standard and crowning OU, and concentrate on the educative use of blogs.

Are there many educative uses of blogs, I ask myself? Are there pedagogical advantages specific to blogs, other than the writing and logic reasoning that are equally required for activities as essay writing, discussion forums and comments? Can self-inspection enhance learning or does it distract from it? Can it claim more than the beautifully shushing spelling of narcissistic?

My own long-standing reluctance towards impersonal diaries and mass letter writing is clogging my imagination and I would be glad if somebody could show me a few good examples. 

I do see potential in the setting up of a course blog for use as a journal, though, where only the student involved and the teacher have access to that student's personal blog. This could be a great tool for courses like poetry or psychology, where the content often touches deeper layers in the student’s mind (and why does this make me think of adolescence?).

I am also reminded of a recent discussion with a niece of mine who is a teacher in a primary school in Belgium. She told me that she had felt the need to change the established Monday morning activity of gathering pupils in a circle and letting them talk about their weekends. The same few kids who commonly overshadowed the talks were usually the ones who had the most exciting weekends, what seemed doubly stinging for the others. Instead, she now made them all write down a few sentences that afterwards could be read by the others. Many future bloggers to be...

Presentations?!

As a newcomer to the fairgrounds where Moodle militants gather, I am still under the charm of the novel words they use. “Let me stage my language stash before the MoodleMoot”, I may think and feel a whiff of magic energy.

This sandy enchantment made it all the more a surprise when, trying to learn about the outcome of the recent Dublin MoodleMoot, I bumped on a collection of down to earth presentations.

Presentations!

I abhor presentations.

One of the more rational reasons of my enthusiasm for eLearning is based on the conviction that its many features will liquidate presentations definitely, conclusively. Only to find out now that they have proliferated even at the heartland of Moodle.

I am aware I am part of a minority. In the university in Kampala where I worked, only two colleagues, neither one Ugandan, shared my aversion towards presentations. The most computer-illiterate lecturers managed somehow to make a passable slideshow. And the students seemed to love them.

What about critical thinking, social constructivism, thoughtful decision-making, multiple learning styles, the dual coding of memory? They didn’t seem to care. The numbing sensation that accompanies a presentation suited them fine as long as the slides were made available afterwards. They often printed them, and I felt sorry for the meagre amount of words lost in a big white paper world.

Now here’s eLearning, I thought. No more presentations when you have pages and logs, roles and activities at your command. Before an audience you still need a beamer of course, but you no longer shoot dumb-dumb bullets in the air. No more death by powerpoint.

I was wrong. I probably underestimated the bond that exists between presenters and presentations, the psychological comfort they offer each other.

Moreover, presentations could make a comeback even in my reluctant world. These last days, you see, I am charmed not so much by words, but by a rich media feature that combines video and, hm hm, a slideshow.

On Moodle and eWallah

So, here’s another blog on Moodle, making your list of feeds even longer then it already is. How will this space be different from the other, good ones, on the topic? For one, I am not writing from the gently pampered position inside an educational building of the West. I have come to know and use the learning platform on the other side of the digital divide.

(What reminds me of the Berlin Wall when still standing, with its observation towers in the East and the West barely ten meters apart. It was not difficult to imagine the view from the other angle. In fact, the view wasn’t that different at all. Still, it made a difference, being here or there.)

In 2008 Renaat and me set up a Moodle platform in landlocked Uganda, one of the lowest bandwidth environments of the world. Originally, all traffic went through satellites and was direly expensive. Then the cable arrived from Kenya, but the poor line has proved vulnerable to attacks from pirate ships and other mishaps ever since.

At the moment eWallah is working with organisations in various locations around the globe. Our server is located somewhere in the Cloud. I myself have moved to Brazil, a country whose name looms big in the list of Moodle sites but where I barely speak the language. All good reasons why, in some ways, I prefer to maintain the outlook of an outsider. I will voice issues considering the point of view of the student who benignly lies his way through the admission test but who barely knows how to move a mouse on introduction day. I’ll walk with the enthusiastic mentor whose students visit the platform only because they feel obliged to. I will be the overzealous apprentice administrator who questions and learns.