Collaborative Blog Research Articles

Teacher talk in an early educator blog: building culture circles for exploring ethics

ABSTRACT This paper examines teacher discourse and the building of culture circles in an asynchronous collaborative blog that combined two different classes in an Early Childhood MS Ed program. Social speech is often considered non-rational. Coupling grounded theory to analyze speech patterns with relational ethics, we argue that teachers engaged in relational discourse that was reflective and social simultaneously. The collaborative blog served as a vehicle for the teachers as they engaged in ethical meaning making.

From Participant Observation to the Observation of Social Distancing: Teaching Ethnography, Blogging and University Education during the Pandemic

This article draws from a collaborative blog Our Quarantine Diaries created during the first COVID-19 confinement in Greece in 2020. In a context of sharing, participation, and solidarity, the blog aimed to facilitate an online/synchronous shared space between students and educators during this period of social distancing. The blog was a way to experiment and reflect through an ethnography of the ‘every day’ to capture aspects of our experiences in quarantine and communicate them to one another. Through the blog we attempted to trace how participant observation can help us understand this new condition of social distancing, using (self)observation, memory and imagination to grasp experience. The result was eighteen multimodal recordings consisting of visual, sonic, musical and verbal information. By the end of the process, we realized that the experiment helped us, if not to overcome, then to engage and to a degree, ‘exercise’ the fear of this new type of ‘evil’ through digital communication, ethnographic observation and anthropological analysis. In this article, we reflect on the digital aspects of the affective and emotional modalities of teaching/doing ethnography via the use of Our Quarantine Diaries blog during this unusual time.

Teaching Innovation in the Development of Professional Practices: Use of the Collaborative Blog

The development of professional practices during the university stage is a fundamental factor for quality skills development. For many students, it is the first real experience in a professional context, so continuous monitoring by teachers is necessary. This article presents an innovative proposal to develop the follow-up of the professional practices of the degree in Primary Education, and two Masters’ in Psychopedagogy and Special Educational Needs using a learning management system (LMS) (Blackboard). The experience was developed by a team of teachers from the departments of Didactics and Educational Organization and Research Methods and Educational Diagnosis of the University of Seville (Spain). The aspects to be studied are the development of communication, reflection, and collaborative learning processes during the internship period. After an explicit agreement, 24 students (10 from the course “Professional Practices I” in undergraduate students; and the others from the Master’s) committed to periodically using the blog designed ad hoc for this experience. A content analysis of the speeches posted on the blog was carried out, examining the changes, the advantages, and the disadvantages that this model entailed. It allowed observing similarities and differences between both groups of students. As the main conclusion, there were some differences between the two groups of students, regarding the number, type, and contents of interventions; there were no differences in the assessment of the methodology, all the students thought that it was a very positive assessment of the experience for generating information exchange networks among colleagues and teachers. Finally, the relevance of constant monitoring of the academic tutor was highlighted.

Effect of Virtual Nutrition Training Based on the Health Belief Model on the Awareness of Patients with Type II Diabetes

Background: Various teaching methods could be used to reduce complications in diabetic patients. Objectives: The present study aimed to assess the effect of nutrition training based on the health belief model (HBM) and electronic methods on the awareness of patients with type II diabetes in Kermanshah, Iran in 2012. Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted at a diabetes clinic in Kermanshah City. In total, 60 patients were selected via convenience sampling and divided into three groups of 20, including SMS, blog, and collaborative blog. Data were collected before, immediately after, and three months after the educational intervention using a standard questionnaire. Data analysis was performed in SPSS version 16 using the Kruskal-Wallis test, Friedman’s test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) at the significance level of 0.05. Results: The mean score of awareness was considered significant (P < 0.01). In addition, significant differences were observed in the perceived sensitivity and barriers, cue to action, and self-efficacy in the blog group (P < 0.05) before and three months after the intervention. In the collaborative blog group, a significant difference was denoted in the perceived severity and cue to action before and three months after the intervention (P < 0.05). Cue to action also differed significantly in the SMS group, and the self-efficacy score significantly changed only in the blog group after the intervention (P = 0.006). Conclusions: According to the results, using blogs, group/collaborative blogs, and SMS could effectively increase the awareness of the diabetic patients. Therefore, virtual training could enhance the structures of the HBM, with the exception of the perceived sensitivity domain.

Boys, blogs and books

In an action research project, young male students from Sydney, Australia and Richmond, USA contributed to a collaborative writing blog. Both groups of students shared the same text with their class teachers, while using the medium of collaborative blogging, a process which was facilitated and managed by the teacher- librarian. Data was gathered using both qualitative and quantitative methods to determine whether the project assisted boys to become powerful, prolific and confident writers. Results indicated that the blogging process failed to provide any increase in the volume of writing; however the opportunity to share opinionsand ideas globally provided motivation to write more powerfully and with increased confidence.

Day of Archaeology 2011–2017: Global Community, Public Engagement, and Digital Practice

The Day of Archaeology (http://www.dayofarchaeology.com) was a volunteer-led international archaeological blogging event that ran from 2011 to 2017. The project asked people who define themselves as archaeologists to submit one or more blog posts about their working day on a chosen day in June or July. This article explores the history of the Day of Archaeology project and the practicalities of running a large-scale collaborative blogging project, before examining some of the topics covered in the posts. An assessment of the impact of the project follows. Overall, we hope in this work to answer some of the basic questions regarding this type of collaborative, online, global engagement – what we did, who we reached, what they talked about – and also to provide some insights for any other similar initiatives that may follow us in the future.

Preservice teachers’ blogging: collaboration across universities for meaningful technology integration

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to explore technology integration by preservice teachers (PSTs) through collaborative blogging between two universities. Researchers aimed to learn more about the ways PSTs apply and integrate technology into classrooms. As digital natives, many PSTs assume that because they already know how to use technology personally, they can also teach using technology. However, learning to integrate technology effectively in educational settings is a challenge. This two-phase qualitative study analyzed blogging between PSTs (n = 83) enrolled in elementary teacher education courses in two different regions of the United States. Data sources included anecdotal records, PST blog post and replies, PST and elementary student technology project artifacts, and questionnaires. The data revealed three themes related to technology integration by PSTs: (1) collaborating in an online community expanded professional learning, (2) PSTs demonstrated shifts in purposes, use of digital tools, and self-efficacy when learning to integrate technology, and (3) blogging served as a conduit for meaningful technology use. Findings show that collaboration through blogging with peers outside the walls of a university classroom was a catalyst for meaningful technology integration.

Open Access Research Via Collaborative Educational Blogging: A Case Study from Library & Information Science

This article charts the development of activities for online graduate students in library and information science. Project goals include helping students develop competencies in understanding open access publishing, synthesizing research in the field, and engaging in scholarly communication via collaborative educational blogging. Using a design experiment approach as a research strategy, focus is placed on the design of the collaborative blogging activity, open access research as a knowledge domain, and analyses of four iterations of the project. Findings from this iterative learning design suggest several benefits of implementing collaborative educational blogging activities in distance contexts.

Motivation and Social Media are important tools in market economy

Social networking sites (e. g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) are one of six types of social media tools identified by Kaplan and Haenlein on the basis of the degree of self-presentation and selfdisclosure required, the degree of intimacy and the immediacy of the medium, and finally the amount and the type of information that can be transmitted in a given time (described as media richness). The remaining five categories include collaborative projects (e. g., Wikipedia, Google Docs), blogs and micro-blogs (e. g., WordPress, Blogger, Twitter), content communities (e. g., YouTube), virtual game worlds (e. g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e. g., Second Life).In the majority of the organisations interviewed, all of the staff did not have access to social media for business purposes. Several reasons were identified for this and included other work requirements preventing staff from actively participating in social media use. Other suggestions were reluctance of staff to use social media for fear of saying something inappropriate about the business and lack of familiarity with social media in some staff members. This paper aims to give a clear description of the terms and concepts of social media and motivation in organization and also aims to identify factors that affect the motivation of employees in public administration from the perspective of Expectancy Theory of Vroom. Motivation and Social media is a hypothetical construct that is used to explain behavior and it should not be equivalent to it.

Telling Our Story: A Case Study of a Collaborative Departmental Blog at Syracuse University Libraries

ABSTRACTThis case study will take readers through the planning and publication process of a collaborative departmental library blog at Syracuse University, which is a large private, non-profit research intensive university located in central New York State. It will provide an overview of the history of the project and the mission of the blog. It will describe the technical aspects, developing a publication schedule, and the editorial responsibilities of maintaining the blog. The impact of the blog is documented. The blog has raised awareness of the librarians' expertise and this is explored alongside how posts have contributed to a number of wider conversations in librarianship.

Utilizing Twitter and #Hashtags Toward Enhancing Student Learning in an Online Course Environment

The authors offer an answer to the research question, To what extent and in what ways is Twitter helpful to student learning when group hashtags are created and used in collaborative educational environments? Sixty-two students in a spring 2012 graduate online Research Methodology course worked individually and in groups to create discussions on topics of interest through Twitter posts and student-created hashtags. Student participants answered nine qualitative and quantitative questions concerning the Twitter/hashtag exercise and used collaborative blog pages to reflect on their experiences. A grounded theory approach was applied to classify data generated from the nine questions and blog postings. An analysis of the study's data resulted in the discovery of the following four themes: access to information, communication, class engagement, and general feedback. Based on these themes, nine recommendations are offered for maximizing the use of Twitter in an online environment for increased student engagement and learning.

English

Weblogs, described by one of their creators as the ‘pirate radio stations’ of the web, are a new, personal and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community. Weblogs are platforms for intelligent reaction to current events and ubiquitous pundits and in recent year, educators have also used it to facilitate the progress of learning. This article introduces the definition of weblog and the major hosted weblog sites: Blogger, LiveJournal, Pitas, Xanga, and WordPress. It also explains the different types of weblogs, from personal blog to topical blog, thoughtful blog, friendblog, collaborative blog, political blog, directory blog, corporate blog, advice blog, formats blog, audio blog, and photoblog. This article reports on the process of using weblog to develop an online exhibition for typography research and education. It also provides an overview of weblog functions, such as, easy uploading of images, video files, audio files and information, digital archiving of exhibits, online gallery space, and comment and feedback in an interactive format. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology , 2014, 34(2), pp. 103-109. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/djlit.34.6751

Developing Students As Global Learners

This case study investigates the use of online blogs as a teaching tool. A collaborative blog was implemented in parallel classes on group processes in the United States and Germany. Our goal was to connect American and German graduate students by helping them to talk about group communication and meeting behaviors. Collected data included transcripts of the messages, as well as students’ evaluations of the blog (collected at the end of the project). Quantitative analyses assessed students’ participation rates and the content of their postings. Qualitative analysis examined the use of the blog as a teaching and learning tool. The results showed that students interacted more on the blog than was required by the instructor. Students valued blogging as a new learning experience. We discuss the pedagogical implications of blog usage for teaching about groups and provide recommendations for instructors interested in using blogs in their own courses.

Understanding management students' reflective practice through blogging

The paper discusses the results of a study on the use of blogging to encourage students to engage in the making of theory–practice linkages and critical thinking within the context of a graduate management course. Sixty-five students participated in collaborative blogging for a period of fiveweeks. The transcripts of these blogs were analyzed using content analysis and chi-square analysis. The findings point to the potential of blogs as a tool for reflection and learning in practitioner-oriented courses. The participants demonstrated a reasonably high level of critical thinking and were able to link theory to their experiences and observations in the work place. The implications of these results for the design of blogging tasks are discussed.

Canine Instinct

Canine Instinct Christopher Newgent (bio) The Barking, Sam Ligon, Editor. http://thebarking.com Perhaps The Barking isn’t as underrated as I feel they are. “It is?” I’m not sure whether we, as a society, have solidified the proper usage of language around collaborative blogs. Are they collective nouns, thus taking the singular? Or are they meant still to represent the individual contributors, thus taking the plural? Let me back up. The Barking is a collaborative literature blog, a promotional offshoot of sorts for Willow Springs, which is itself a promotional offshoot of sorts for the Eastern Washington University writing program. Helmed by editor Sam Ligon, the blog features a steadily rolling stream of contributors from the Willow Springs staff, past and present. It’s this wide array of voices that creates the similarly wide array of topics and points of view that gives The Barking its charm. Whereas many, if not most, literature blogs exist to create and/or support their own aesthetic camps, The Barking is as varied as the candidates EWU accepts for its writing program. This could be argued as its own aesthetic camp, but from what I’ve gathered in following The Barking and in personal conversations with Ligon and students of the program, the powers-that-be at EWU work to create a program that accepts diverse styles to balance and play against each other, to expose people to other ways of writing or reading. For better or worse, this tends to give The Barking the effect of sitting around a workshop table ten minutes before the professor (read: Sam Ligon) walks in. Sam Edmonds is in the corner with his headphones on, journaling away, or maybe chatting with Seth Marlin about old-school punk rock. Monet is scribbling away at her recent poetry challenge, trying to chew that last line into something more digestible. I just imagine Kathryn Houghton as a starer, sitting there watching everything, thinking of the larger implications of the way Amaris chews her pen. Essentially, while everyone is here for writing, they are their own persons. Which brings me back around to those grammatical questions up top, and ultimately, to my opening statement: is The Barking underrated? Have you heard of them? If you have, it’s likely because The Barking is the blog that blew the lid off that whole BlazeVOX [books] thing last year. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably the better for it, but there were some worthwhile industry discussions that arose from the tumult. If you’re interested in publishing industry hullabaloos, Google “BlazeVOX controversy” and take a couple hours to sift through the madness. Those 9,250+ Google returns are the progeny of Brett Ortler’s barking of a rather shifty exchange between himself and the editor of BlazeVOX. Other than that, the folks at The Barking tend to keep to themselves. You rarely find contributors sounding off on the most recent industry shit-storm like you will at blogs like HTMLGIANT and We Who Are About To Die. You find instead writing challenges, whether Monet’s poetry challenges or a group of them embarking on whatever NaNo...Mo suits their genre. You find well-developed author interviews, reviews that provoke thought beyond whether you wish to buy the book-in-question. You find writers writing, reading, and writing about what they’re reading. I don’t know necessarily if it’s editorial policy that keeps the contributors from really going out and trying to make a name for themselves getting into the thick of things or if they’re just the kind of people who like to keep it quiet—that whole “room of one’s own” thing. It’s hard to write or read when you’re spending so much time keeping up with all the latest industry tumults on other literary blogs, which is one thing I’ve always appreciated about The Barking: they are a group who likes to get the work done. [End Page 10] Christopher Newgent Christopher Newgent lives in Indianapolis, where he founded Vouched Books to promote small press literature in his city. His chapbook, The Fullness of Everything...

Enacting Literacy Pedagogies: A collaborative self-study by teacher educators in physical education and science

As beginning teacher educators we aimed to examine our pedagogical approaches for engaging teacher candidates in thinking about physical literacy and scientific literacy, respectively. We employed self-study research methodologies to explore our literacy practices and developing pedagogies of teacher education, the similarities and differences in our approaches and practices, and the utility of collaborating in two different subject areas. Data were collected and analyzed over one academic year using a collaborative blog and bi-weekly meetings. The self-study helped us understand several conceptual similarities between the concepts of physical literacy and scientific literacy. By discussing our thoughts about teaching and learning, we began to craft a shared vision for our pedagogies of teacher education with literacy as the central piece of that vision. The collaborative nature of this self-study provided both support and encouragement from a trusted colleague and a safe space to explore and reframe problematic aspects of practice.

Presence and Absence: The Impact of Collaborative Blogging on Devised Ensemble Work

ABSTRACT Three theatre TAs critically evaluate the use of collaborative blogging as part of a teen performance program.

Controversy and the Collaborative Literary Blog

Controversy and the Collaborative Literary Blog James Tadd Adcox (bio) “On August 5th, Jimmy Chen, one of the regular contributors to HTMLGIANT.com, published “Internet persona afflictions” on the site. The post consisted of a Venn diagram, created by Chen, grouping primarily small-press authors into categories including “Esoteric,” “Academic,” “Douche,” and “Menstrual.” It was a controversial post. Several commenters, including author Kate Zambreno (whom Chen had placed in the “Menstrual” circle), and Chen’s fellow HTMLGIANT contributor Roxane Gay accused the post of being misogynistic. One anonymous commenter wrote, This is stupid and you’re being a bully idiot. If you don’t understand why, you need to do some serious introspection, esp. re: the menstrual stuff (oh my god! I’m calling you out on being misogynist! Someone call me a bitch, quick!) The bully idiocy of this will remain true even though a million people will jump on me for saying it and for being anonymous (don’t feel up to being mocked on the internet. Oh my god, someone call me a coward, quick!) The bully idiocy will remain true past all that and most of us who don’t regularly tickle HTMLGIANT’s balls will all continue to know it. HTMLGIANT is a collaborative literary blog, one of the largest and most active on the Internet. There are a host of others, including Big Other, We Who Are About to Die, Plumb, and (though it’s been infrequently active recently) Trick with a Knife. Whereas a post at these other collaborative blogs might garner five or ten or (much more rarely) fifty or more comments, it’s rare that HTMLGIANT goes a week without at least one post receiving a hundred or more. Unique visitors average around 65,000 a month. A sort of community has grown up around HTMLGIANT. Commenters’ screen names and personalities become familiar even when one doesn’t know the person said names are attached to. The posts most likely to generate over one hundred comments are, of course, the controversial ones. Roxane Gay, one of the contributors to HTMLGIANT (and one of the commenters who wrote to say that she found the “Internet persona afflictions” post sexist), identifies several such controversial posts, including a previous Jimmy Chen post on Zelda Fitzgerald, as “significant moments in the evolution of the site…posts that generated a lot of contentious discussion about matters of difference and reflected some of the site’s growing pains.” The controversial posts can often lead to quite aggressive arguments in the comments, which in turn can make some people less willing to comment. According to HTMLGIANT contributor Mike Kitchell, “The ‘comment culture’ at Giant is really weird, because I feel like there’s a huge readership (that stats attest to), but very few regular commenters any more. To be honest I feel like a lot of the more troll-y/assholeish commenters scare some people away.” Part of the value of HTMLGIANT lies in this anarchy. Referring on her blog to the Zelda Fitzgerald post, Kate Zambreno has said, “I now am uneasy going over to HTML Giant, or at least commenting there, because I feel sometimes things get sweaty boy locker room in there, that when I am witness to it I have to play some hard-nosed feminist ideologue that I am not. That’s no fun.” Nonetheless, all of the site contributors I spoke with identified various controversial posts as the primary moments of significance in the site’s past, although Jimmy Chen argues that the response to such posts has resulted in “a kind of boring and ultimately condescending responsibility to be socially more aware.” What is the value of a space like HTMLGIANT? Literary authors have traditionally worked in “schools” or other restricted economies before (hopefully) becoming established in the wider culture. Such groups are by their nature somewhat cliquish, with correspondence between members being either in person, through letters, or in small- circulation journals—restricted, but also more or less invisible spaces. Unlike these restricted but invisible spaces, HTMLGIANT is public. And, if it’s less restricted, in the sense that anyone can add to the comments section of a post, its...

Visualizing Change: Participatory Digital Technologies in Research and Action

New visual technologies are changing the ways that anthropologists do research and opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches appealing to diverse audiences. Participatory digital methodologies featured in this special issue include digital storytelling, Photovoice, interactive multimedia as new media ethnography, participatory digital archival research, and participatory geographic information systems (GIS). Other methodologies involving participatory digital methodologies that are gaining traction in anthropology include community-based filmmaking (Biella 2006) and collaborative blogging and website production (Hess 2001; Young 2007). Research participants are producing digital representations of their experiences, taking and sharing pictures, and mapping their own environments. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, putting the methods literally in the hands of the participants themselves. They appeal to wide audiences, allowing for access to and production of anthropological knowledge beyond the academy.

Collaborative E-Learning Using Semantic Course Blog

Collaborative e-learning delivers many enhancements to e-learning technology; it enables students to collaborate with each other and improves their learning efficiency. Semantic blog combines semantic Web and blog technology that users can import, export, view, navigate, and query the blog. We developed a semantic course blog for collaborative e-learning. Using our semantic course blog, instructors can import the lecture course. Students can team up for projects, ask questions, mutually discuss problems, take the comments, support answers, and query the blog information. This semantic course blog provided a platform for collaborative e-learning framework. In this chapter, we described some collaborative e-learning and semantic blog technology, and then we introduced functions, implementation and how collaborative e-learning appears in semantic course blog.