Blogs are an increasingly important medium of academic discourse in the field of educational technology (see Martin Weller's view, for example) . And H809 is a course for those who want to learn about research in educational technology. So we encourage course participants to keep a personal reflective blog, as a way of exploring the potential of the blogging medium. And this year, we've decided to create a formal Course Blogger role.
What will our Course Blogger do?
Well, overall the aim is to maximise the value of the online experience for those taking the course.
This can include:
- Synthesising, analysing and building on questions, points of interest, resources, links and references raised during the discussions within individual tutor groups and elsewhere on the web.
- Commenting on the substance of course participants' blog posts: providing an incentive for newbie bloggers to get the posts out.Blogging about their own research, giving course participants an idea of how research happens in practice, an example of academic blogging, and insights into a particular topic.
- Helping out with online discussions and activities.
- Identifying and archiving stuff that might be useful for the course in subsequent years.
- Oh, and of course reflecting on what a Course Blogger should do...
Will it work?
Not sure: it's an experiment, so the worst that can happen is that we get interesting recommendations for how not to do it in the future. But we'd be interested to hear of similar endeavours and how they fared.
