Reflecting on Blogs and Blogging

For those of you who have been following the 8 Blog for the last 9 or 10 months, you know the power of this medium.  By offering weekly posts connected to teaching and learning with technology, it has been my hope that you’ve been able to learn new ways to incorporate more online collaboration in your classes and to integrate new technologies that promote student reflection and creativity.  Despite its meager beginnings, the 8 Blog has been read by over 1500 visitors from at least four different continents.  August was the busiest month ever on the 8 Blog with over 300 visitors. Pretty amazing stuff.

I share these statistics not to pat myself on the back or to boast.  Instead, I offer these data to demonstrate the reach of the blog format.  Blogging is a new medium that gives writers instant access to a world of possible readers.  Besides being an international forum for ideas, blogging can also be a tremendous tool for fostering reflection and higher order thinking.  Blogging gives writers a voice and offers them a space to work through beliefs, opinions and thoughts.  With all of its benefits, blogging has natural connections to our classes and to learning.  Could your students be blogging in your class?  Absolutely.  You could offer weekly blog prompts that have students reflect on the material they learned that week.  You could monitor their development throughout a course and see how their opinions and beliefs have changed.  I’ve used blogging with several classes and I find I get to know my students better by reading their blog posts.  I also get a better idea of the concepts I need to reteach or spend more time addressing instructionally.

If you’re new to blogging, you may be wondering how to get started.  While there a variety of different blogging tools out there, Blogger and WordPress are two of the easiest blogging sites to use with a class of students.  With both sites, you can add multiple authors and even set the blog so it’s only readable to the students in the class.  This helps create a private community where ideas can be shared without worrying about the “world of readers” I mentioned earlier.  If you’re using a Ning with your class, there is already a blogging feature within the site that works seamlessly with the rest of the network.

If you need some technical assistance setting things up, be sure to check out these resources.

Blogger Help Youtube Channel

WordPress Support

Educause Guide to Blogging

Presentations with Prezi

Sometimes nature has a way of pointing you in the direction you need to go.  Take this week’s post.  I’ve known about Prezi for a few years but it seems that everywhere I’ve gone recently, somebody has mentioned the site.  I figured it was time to feature the site on the 8 Blog.

Prezi is a really unique presentation application that breaks away from stale PowerPoint slides.  At its simplest, PowerPoint offers users a rectangular canvas in which to display bulleted lists, graphics and text.  Sure, people can add in transitions, animations or sounds, but the end result still looks like a bunch of rectangles that a presenter plods through.  Prezi offers something completely different.  Instead of rectangles, envision a presentation landscape where a presenter can zoom into and hop from topic to topic like a plane flying from destination to destination on a round the world journey.  The most unique part of Prezi is its user interface.  Most software uses some type of menu-driven system to allow users to make changes.  Prezi uses a series of concentric circles to let you move an object, change its size or rotate it.   It takes some getting used to at first but, after a while, seems completely logical and fluid.

Consider using Prezi as an alternate way of giving a lecture.  You can also have your students use Prezi to create a presentation to share with classmates.  Since Prezi lives online, it can be accessed from any computer with Internet access and can be embedded in loads of other sites.  A Prezi presentation can even be downloaded so it can be run in locations without Internet access.  Check out this short Prezi I created that briefly explains the history Web 1.0.   Need some help getting started?  Be sure to check out the following introductory tutorial from the people at Prezi.

What to do about your Ning?

So, in case you haven’t heard, Ning isn’t free anymore.  In the spring, Ning announced that they could no longer support its site through advertising alone and were moving to a subscription model.  They rolled out the pricing plans this summer and the prices will go into effect at the end of this week (August 20, 2010).  If you have a Ning and haven’t visited it lately, they will prompt you to select a plan when you log in.  I know a lot of instructors started using Ning last year and I’ve gotten a fair number of questions recently about what they should do with their Ning.  If you have a Ning and are wondering what to do, here are some different options that you may want to consider.  Choose an option that’s best for you based on your circumstances.

1.  Buck up and pay the piper. The Internet has been a smorgasbord of free stuff over the last couple of decades, but I think we may be seeing a fundamental shift in how online resources are funded.  Can advertising really support all of the tools we use?  Ning tried to use advertising to support its site and failed miserably.  For about $3 a month, you can convert your Ning to a Ning Mini and still have blogs, forums, and video embeds (but no uploads).  For about $20 a month, you could get a few more options (unlimited members, more storage, etc) but I really don’t know how people will utilize these features with their classes.  Ning also offers a premium plan for $50 a month but this is mostly targeted at businesses who want loads of options for their network.

2.  Apply for a free Ning. You read that right.  You can apply for a free Ning.  Technically, Pearson is supporting Ning Minis for educators.  If you have a Ning and you use it with your classes, you can apply for a Ning Mini here.  I applied for free Ning Minis for three of the Nings I manage and all were approved in a few weeks.  I’ll definitely have less flexibility with a Ning Mini but it’s still free.  And free is good.

3.  Switch to another social networking site. A bunch of sites have sprung up to take Ning’s place.  I’ve set up networks with a number of them and none strike me as being as easy to use as Ning or as customizable.  Webs is promising, but it has a pretty steep learning curve initially.  Spruz is a really popular option that is fairly easy to use, but I’m a little concerned by the size of the free sites they offer (10 Mb dedicated for uploaded files).  I think some instructors could extend this amount pretty quickly.  Grou.ps is probably the easiest to use of the Ning options, but it’s pricing structure is based not only on the amount of storage that a site needs but also the bandwidth used.  It offers a basic free site with video uploading (not just embedding from another site) but I wonder how quickly a network would extend the free account (10 Gb of space, 100 Gb downloaded) and need to start paying for additional space and bandwidth.  WackWall is an intriguing option.  It’s still in Beta (which means it’s still being tested before public release) but it has a great deal of features (video uploads, blogs, forums, etc).  From an aesthetic point of view, it is pretty bare bones but you can customize some colors and choose from five different themes.  My hesitation with this site is that it’s still in Beta.  Who knows if someone who moves their site from Ning to avoid paying a fee doesn’t end up paying more with WackWall in December?

4.  Back up your Ning. Regardless of the choice you make, you should probably archive your Ning data.  Not only does it allow you to hold onto all of the data in your network, it allows you to easily upload that data to a new site if you choose.  Archiving is a relatively new option in Ning but you can achive any of the features you use (videos, discussions, comments, etc).  To archive your network, open your Ning and select My Network.  Under Content is an option for Archive and it will walk you through the process.  You’ll need to install a few free pieces of software but it’s a pretty painless process.

5.  Call it quits on social networking. I hope this isn’t what most people choose.  Sure, this Ning pricing overhaul has caused some problems but consider all of the positives that occur by creating networks for students interact, collaborate and socially construct their understanding.  It’s not just anecdotal evidence, either.  Check out this work from Dr. Rey Junco, a professor at Lock Haven who studies social networking.  Like it or not, social networking is here to stay.  The question is whether we recognize it as a beneficial tool for our classrooms or not.

What are you planning to do?  I’d like to hear from some of you who are using Nings with your classrooms and who are deciding what to do.  Share your experiences and your thought process by adding a comment to the blog.

Simple Data Visualization with SHOW Mapping Worlds

The world is swimming in data.  Census data.  Education data.  Economic data.  It can be difficult to make sense of all those numbers especially when they’re arranged in some gargantuan Excel spreadsheet.  Luckily, loads of sites are appearing online to help make all that data a little more digestible.  Take SHOWMappingWorlds.  Funded by a bunch of international agencies (Amnesty International, UNESCO and Unicef, for example), SHOWMappingWorlds allows users to select different datasets from America, Japan or from the whole globe.  Want to see the illiteracy rates for different countries across the globe?  Use the drop down menus to select People and the Education subset where you can see the sizes of the countries change size visually to represent the respective illiteracy rates of each country.  You can also choose from a multitude of different datasets to show American dropout rates, Iraqi war deaths, unemployment rates or even beer consumption.  The great part is all of the maps can be embedded in other locations or downloaded to your local computer.  Check out the worldwide illiteracy and American dropout maps I created below.

I think data visualization sites can be really beneficial in our classrooms.  If we want our students to be able to make data-driven decisions, we need to help them learn how to access data online, make sense of it and use the data in constructive ways.  Sites like SHOWMappingWorlds can help students digest the sea of data that’s out there in a visual way.

Watching online videos together with Synchtube

One of the challenges of teaching online is fostering a sense of classroom community from a distance.  In a face-to-face classroom environment, students share the same space and participate in the same conversations at the same time.  This synchronous activity can help promote an interconnectedness amongst classmates that can be beneficial in a variety of educational ways (small group projects, class discussions, etc).  But how do we incorporate similar activity online?  A good bit of online instruction occurs through asynchronous activities.  In online classes, students post to discussion boards or write reflections in a blog, but these activities are done individually on each student’s own time.  Unless a “live classroom” tool like Wimba or Elluminate is used, students rarely get to interact online the same way that they would in a face-to-face classroom.

But new synchronous options are emerging.  Take Synchtube, for example.  With Synchtube, an instructor can set up a room where 25 participants can watch videos and chat with one another simultaneously.   It’s really easy to set up and can help to foster those real-time discussions and reactions that would occur when a powerful video is watched in a face-to-face class.  The challenge is that Synchtube only works with Youtube videos, which can limit your selections.  Pulling from YouTube EDU might help you find more educational videos and help you avoid those clones of Charlie Bit My Finger.   Be sure to check out the short tutorial on using Synchtube below.