Continuing adventures in elgg-land
Posted by Paul Allison on September 26th, 2006
Here’s a short list of some of the issues facing those of use who have ventured into Youth Voices and the Personal Learning Space.
- How do we prevent students’ posts from getting lost, down the list, off the front page?
- How do we organize classes, with communities? What does this really look like?
- Is there a way to post to both a personal blog and to the community at the same time?
- Why doen’t the elgg support code like and other media embedding codes such as the one provided by YouTube?
- How do we want students responding to each other on the elgg? Should we provide them with guidelines? What would these look like?
- After students have set up a marker on our CommunityWalk Map: Entry Points, how do we invite or encourage them to pay attention to other students’ markers?
- More generally, how do we find ways to encourage playful exploration of other students’ posts?
- Will students evolve a need for communities or do we need to think about how to inspire students to set these up for each other?
- How much guidence do we need to provide? It’s hard to sit back and just encourage students to surf around, and it feels artificial to require something like, “Write a response to a post from someone you don’t know.” What’s the right balance beween open reading/responding and structured requirements?
- What’s the difference between personal blogging and blogging done for an academic class?
- How do we get more teachers to join us on Youth Voices and the Personal Learning Space?
- How do we encourage students to be real in their blog posts, yet also conscious about how much to keep private and how much to make public?
These are some of the questions that will guide our storytelling about using elggs in secondary classrooms on our live webcast on Wednesday evening at 9:00 Eastern. Join us and tell a few stories of your own from this young semester. Go to EdTechTalk.com on Wednesdays at 9:00 PM. See you there!
September 26th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
HI Paul,
You have raised some excellent questions, some of which I have had myself.
My students (Lower Canada College) have been using the personallearningspace elgg environment for about ten days or so now. I have had some experience with blogs (I blog - or try to - regularly) and have just completed my thesis (Ed Tech) in collaborative online learning for high school students.
One of the interesting results of my research was that students really appreciated having “someone important” respond to their posts. With that in mind, I approached my headmaster at the beginning of the year and asked if he would read my students’ blogs and leave comments if they were asked to blog about his weekly assembly addresses.
We are a school in Montreal. Many of you are aware that about two weeks ago, a gunman opened fire on a college campus here killing one and leaving twenty others wounded before turning the gun on himself. It hurt our community very hard. The first opportunity we had to listen to the headmaster was when he spoke after this tragic event. The students were asked to blog about their thoughts about the tragedy and his address.
I have been very impressed with the level of thinking that my grade 9 students have displayed. They were asked to comment on two of their peers’ posts after creating their own post. Again, the quality has been impressive.
Three years ago, I created a rubric for evaluation of online participation. I would be very happy to share it with you as it might provide you with some of the criteria that I believe should be evident in online communication.
I believe the requirement to blog academically is a valid one. We are asking our students to think and write critically and reflectively, share ideas, display good citizenship qualities, learn to disagree without offending - the list goes on. The best blogging will take place when there is an authentic issue and an authentic audience (the “important person”). You may want to consider asking such people to visit the students’ blogs and leave comments. Perhaps you may want to approach local experts in issues and topics that you are tackling in your classroom.
The organization of elgg, I agree, is hard to figure out. Someone noted that some of my students had not changed their password after entering the system and wreaked a bit of havoc with html code. I immediately created a community to shelter our blogs from the rest of the elgg “walled garden”. For the moment, this is the way I will keep it, until my students have become more facile in the environment and we want to encourage some cross-fertilization of ideas.
I look forward to attending tomorrow night and hear some of your ideas and observations in this wonderful new environment. I should add that I have also been using a moodle for forums (a different kind of online communication experience) and that my students will be working on some international collaborative online projects this year.
See you tomorrow night!
September 26th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
[…] I visited the Teachers Teaching Teachers site tonight to see what was new, and discovered an excellent post by one of the founding teachers of personallearningspace. He raises a number of questions about the elgg environment and questions about how to encourage students to post and respond. […]
September 28th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
[…] Continuing adventures in elgg-land […]
September 29th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Why doen’t the elgg support code like and other media embedding codes such as the one provided by YouTube?
A lot of people have banned the embed and object tags because they can be the entry point for all kinds of malware that you don’t want swimming around your sites. Of course, Youtube, Google Video etc are important - I certainly spend a lot of my time on both - and we want to make those available, although for now we’ve decided the safety issue is more important. Once Elgg Spaces is fully open I’m going to be writing a plugin for Elgg that will provide a way to embed videos from those sites.