Blogging — Internal or External
One of the cardinal elements of modern on-line communications is, since 2003, the use of blogs. The tricky question is whether to have students do them within a closed community, in our case a wiki structure, or to have them be public. When I taught a version of this course last year, I left the option open to the students, and most of them understood the distinction–if you are essentially doing an internal journal of your thoughts on the readings, then internal makes most sense. If you want engagement with the world, then post on blogger, WordPress, etc.
This year I am going to ask students to do two different blogs
1.) an internal one in which they respond to questions in preparation for class, and reflect on the readings and issues that emerge in class.
2.) An external one, using the Zimbio social news site, as a home base. This is a site which allows for collaboration, and enables users to put up links to many different types of news feeds, blogs, tagging, and anything that you can link to with an RSS feed. By surrounding students with news they can choose, the idea is to facilitate their engagement with the web as a news environment.
[...] I just published most of this post on the Class Acts blog, but I think that it is important to illustrate this broader point here as well. I use “educational technology” practices as an example here, but the innovative theory applies in almost every type of organization, perhaps even more particularly in a business setting. For some edu-tech background on this discussion, click here. Educational technology–like technology in most any venue–can really be defined as either a sustaining or disruptive innovation. These are buzzwords that I tend to use quite frequently, but the distinction is quite important. [...]