Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Blogs and Wikis for Literacy

These thoughts come from reading Doug Belshaw's blog here. This post led me to his class wiki, the class blog roll, and a discussion of how this works in practice. Reading all three in conjunction is fruitful.

I can certainly see a literacy class, where the class materials are on one page - a wiki, and where the student writing is on a set of others - blogs. Moodle certainly has the set up to do this, but the wiki approach is more straightforward and more easily customisable, and the learners might prefer to be in a more public (and more neutral) space. I'll have a go in Moodle and see if I can make it look right. The problem Doug Belshaw has is where to store the blogs, but with a smaller literacy class each student could have a Blogger account.

I also liked Doug's recent post on Hitting the Wall, talking about wanting innovate as with elearning but finding a brick wall - cue nice illustrations. This is just as relevant in FE as in Secondary School. He doesn't talk about demotivated (and confused) staff though, maybe that only happens in FE.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris,

I'm glad you're finding my blog posts and what I'm doing with my students interesting! I have tried to use Moodle before - albeit a couple of years ago - but felt a bit too restricted by it.

So long as you link the tools used by students together, at a central place (e.g. the teacher's website/blog) then everything works pretty well. Students can just use their email address or the same username coupled with the same password for everything used in that class. :-)

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