Well, it might be considered unfair to require the students in this course to blog weekly and not do it myself (not counting the other things I blog about separately), so here goes.
I do understand why students feel a bit overwhelmed and confused about the course right at the beginning. We are trying to get a variety of different communications media started here, probably more than one would use for courses with students in other fields. But this is an instructional technology course, and we do want to get some practice with a variety of different things as we go along. The other problem is that these things overlap in the semester, or some of them do, anyway. In this course, the Podcast (to take one example) can be a relatively short, self-contained unit. You read about podcasting, think and discuss about what it might be used for, and then smpend some time creating one (much of which involves learning some audio editing software). It doesn't need to be ongoing, unless you decide to do that once a week on your own.
The thing is, though, that other technologies that we are looking at are not quite like that. Blogging, wikis, Twitter, and others are ongoing and have to be experienced that way. Once we get everything set up, however, it should fall into place better and come together for most of us. And yes, I include myself in that. I'm spending a lot of time now trying to make sure that I have everything covered, that I am following all blogs, and so on.
All in all, I'm hoping that the class will trust me for a little while to see whether it gets a bit better soon.
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RSS feeds are the way to go with these blogs. In Outlook 2007, you can "pull" in feeds right to your mail file. Then, if you keep up, it is not too bad.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the Outlook RSS feed idea. I have not used that feature yet. Since I get so many support emails I was afraid they would get lost :-) unless I setup folders and rules, so I have been following Blogs via Google Reader. We are fortunate to have so many technology tools to choose from :-), yet sometimes overwhelming. I took at class at Kent on Web 2.0 tools and it really helped to open my eyes to all the tools. I'm by no means an expert...just trying to keep up.
ReplyDeleteI had a little trouble setting up netvibes at first, but now that I have it going, I really like it as a way to bring everything together. I get so much email, I, too, worry about things getting lost there.
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