Another semester of our WebDesign course is about to begin, and as usual, I’m trying to think of ways that our learning experience can be improved.For the last two semesters we’ve been using the Design Websites blog to communicate, with the course facilitators posting articles, and the rest of us being able to comment or post responses on our own blogs. But I’ve always got this niggling feeling that this model still reflects the idea that the “teacher” is the dispenser of knowledge, and everyone else just eats it up! OK, so this might be the case when a semester starts, but surely learners should be gradually contributing more and more to the learning while the facilitator slips into the background?!
Soo, thanks to the Teach and Learn Online network, I’m currently trialing Suprglu - a web service that pulls together posts from a whole bunch of blogs, and displays them in order as if it was one big team blog! This way when a learner posts something interesting on their own blog, it appears automatically on our class blog. Learners and facilitators contribute to the learning together! (Edit: Although one issue with SuprGlu seems to be how often the page is updated… currently taking over 12hrs! But as the SuprGlu team says, they’re not google, they don’t have a server-farm)
If you’re part of the WebDesign course, check out the Webdesign SuprGlu page and let me know what you think! If you already use a news reader then this won’t really offer you any benefit, but otherwise, it’s a great way to see what everyone in class is writing about!
(Note: The image above is a work of the National Institutes of Health, part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.)
Hi Michael,
I’ve been playing a little with SuprGlu and the notion of a feedbook for some PD I’ll be facilitating this year. In a lot of ways I’m thinking about a resource that can accommodate both information from the teacher and students for the reasons you’ve outlined above, and also integrate dynamic and static links to resources.
At http://www.otheredge.com.au/klogs/toolkit/archives/003283.html I’ve fleshed out how it might work and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. It’s been built using primarily using SuprGlu (did experiment with Stephen Downes’ MyGlu but it’s not quite doing what I want yet) and Feed2JS from http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ .
Please ignore the css floats playing up in IE (Win) and Safari!
Hi Kirsty!
Yeah, the feedbook idea is great hey! I had a look at your screenshots… great idea! I’d leave a comment there but guess you must have also got lots of spam! (Robin mentioned he turned commenting off on his blog).
Looks like you’ve identified and included 3 excellent sources of info: (1) Input from outside the community, (2) input from within the community, and (3) static input that gives some structure to the learning (but might be hard to update?)
I haven’t been through the whole thought process, but my initial thought is, why build a separate meta-environment to string these three together (or 4 if you include the flickr)? Why not use one SuprGlu-esq page for (1), another SuprGlu-esq page for (2) that pulls together all the student and facilitater blogs, and something like a wikibook for (3) (for eg: see the Web Design wiki).
I’m guessing that you’re pulling them together to make it easier for the beginning student? but will wait to hear from you! :-)