A Blogging Journey Begins

By Shula Klinger
Lead Instructional Designer
South Island Distance Education School (SIDES)

The other day, I was tinkering with Desire2Learn's Blog tool. A colleague was asking me what it could do, so I directed her to an example I had made. She wondered if the Blog would be suited to a novel study for her students, who were taking English 11. I thought this would work just fine and sent her a Skype message back, to say so. "Give me five minutes and I'll post something for you!"

"Can it have links in it?" she asked.

"Oh, sure. I'll add some of those, too."

As we chatted back and forth in Skype, we learned all sorts of things. We learned that - as with most blogs - you can add links and images. We learned that both the student's blog and each individual entry are given their own unique URLs. This solved a problem I'd been struggling with for a few days: if a student posted to the same blog in every single course, it would soon become unwieldy. Every teacher who set a blog entry as an assignment would have to scroll through numerous entries to find the one they'd asked for. Not so! With a URL, all the student has to do is send the address of that entry. Problem solved.

But could students link between entries, as if they were pages on a web site? Yes, they could. And could they post comments? Yes. By the time we'd been chatting for 25 minutes, we had a novel study posted with a link to an author bio and a set of comments, including tips and tricks for students.... all of which gave us even more ideas. Maybe this would change how the students shared their work and communicated with each other? Maybe it would set up a different dynamic than the online discussions we normally used? Maybe the students - all of whom learn via distance, from different locations - would engage in different kinds of debate, with the blog acting like a conference booth?

What happened next? Were the grade 11 English students as engaged by the Blog as their instructor hoped they would be? Did the Blog enrich their online learning experience? This blogging journey continues in the next edition of the Community Newsletter.

This article is an excerpt from Shula's Instructional Design Blog (infopop.blogspot.com) reprinted here with the author's permission.