All entries for Friday 08 April 2005

April 08, 2005

Nostalgia for MoveableType excerpt feature

Follow-up to Shock of the Old Conference, 2005 from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In this entry I recall the 'show only excerpt on home page' feature of the MoveableType blogging system. I consider how this could be a way of addressing the problem that 'compartmentalizing' people have with a wide range of subjects and activities being represented in full on their blog homepage.

*My confidence in this entry:* 80%
Importance of this entry to me: 70%

Main text

Actually, nostalgia for just one particular feature of MoveableType: the ability to set up the blog homepage so that only the first part of each entry is shown on it. MT entries can have a (slightly misnamed) excerpt field. This is effectively the first part paragraph of the entry, which tends to be used as a short introduction or overview explaining what the entry is about, with the effect of giving a sense of what kind of entry it is and what kind of people should read it.

Only the excert is listed on the homepage, with a link to read more. For example, see how it is used on the Auricle blog

I liked using this for four reasons:

  1. it makes the blog homepage less cluttered;
  2. it encouraged me to give an overview of the entry, making more sense of it;
  3. readers could quickly see which entries were of interest to them;
  4. it makes it easier to keep a blog with a diverse range of types of entry and topics – readers aren't turned away by seeing one of my mad philosophy entries filling the whole front page, instead they can just read an excerpt and decide to read one of my more sensible entries.

Now that I'm using my blog for so many different reasons, including containing long well developed texts alongside random brain-dump bucket lists, the excerpt feature would be really useful.

I suspect that others have the same problem. During my Shock of the Old presentation I put forward the argument that a blog is a good place to join-up, or at least contain, aspects from the different parts of my 'spaghetti-like' life – work, academic and social. The response to this was interestingly split. Many people could see themselves doing just that. But many others would not want to combine these different aspects in one place. They are what i would call 'compartmentalisers'. They like to seperate things out. They would use a blog for a specific purpose, for example, sharing family stories and photos. But they feel uncomfortable about putting that on the same page as work. I suspect that many students have this problem with the idea of putting academic things on their blog next to their social blogging.

Obviously they could use categorisation, however, they didn't seem to think that would be enough. The entries would still appear in full together on the homepage.

But using an excerpt approach would help to alleviate that problem, and may well encourage more of those compartmentalizers to blog.

For now, I'm going to start writing a brief intro to every entry that I write, clearly identified as the 'overview', and i'll see if it makes a difference.


: 08 Apr 2005 08:52 |  Tags:   |  Comments (6) |  Report a problem

Shock of the Old Conference, 2005

Writing about web page http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2005/index.xml

What a great conference! I presented a paper yesterday at the Oxford University Learning Technology Group's Shock of the Old 2005 conference. My presentation was ostensibly about 'The Warwick Blogs Experience', largely from the perspective of a student who uses Warwick Blogs in his work. But the subtext was that for universities like Warwick, we necesarily need to shift the emphasis of our development work away from top-down systems that seek to organize and extend formal/beaurocratic learning processes, to creating systems that support the kinds of self-organized and informal learning activities that are actually much more common and important in a top-end university. The kinds of independent and creative activities that embody what HE at this level should be about.

It wasn't at all a coincidence that Derek Morrison of Bath (author of the Auricle blog) gave a presentation before, also saying exactly that (report coming next). This is something that i really believe in, and i'm so happy to hear other people agreeing. It was interesting to note that the most enthusiasm came from delegates from places like Bath, UCL, Imperial, Edinburgh, OU.

Here's a few of the points that i covered:

  • The 'network effect' (if you have friends who use a system, you are more likely to start using it) is important, use it;
  • Informal learning (even ranting) leads to better formal learning – this argument seemed to go down well;
  • High end learning is very personal, social, and involves a big investment by the student;
  • Blogs give an attractive place in which to do this, students need to find the system attractive and exciting, need to have a sense of ownership over something so personal and so social as there own learning;
  • Bucket model – just get them to record stuff, use blog as a bucket – blogs help with this, and its a valuable thing to do. Joe Talbot of LTG is also using his blog in this way, but has made some modifications to make it easier;
  • Too much processing can be a bad thing- just write it without thinking, blogs are sufficiently informal for people to feel comfortable about this;
  • Blogs can help deal with complex experiences and a complex multi-faceted life (such as that of a student);
  • Learning at this level is mainly about 'conceptual modelling' – recieving, creating, understanding, recording, explicating, testing, modifying, joining-up and contextualizing conceptual models;
  • PDP is meta-modelling of this modelling behaviour;
  • This is difficult, but blogs can really help;
  • Blogs is just the environment in which this can happen in many different ways, suited to different people;
  • Blogs provide a sandbox in which students can try things out, a slightly less official and authoritative environment;
  • As we are asking students to take risks with there thinking, such a sandbox is reallly important;
  • The concept of the 'star blogger' is preventing lesser mortals from using blogs in a risky, experimental way or as a bucket;
  • Making blogs to institutional and too close to formal learning will detract from this sandbox role;
  • To make this work we have to hand over control, trust the students;
  • Biggest blockers are student expectations and attitudes – students are end-product focussed – they need to become more concerned with the processes that get them to the end product;
  • Can blogs help to overcome this?

As you can see, I covered a huge range of points, some of which are quite radical in the learning technology world. But the response was very positive.

Some responses afterwards:

  • "Come and do that presentation at our university, we'll pay you to do it".
  • "I really like your educational theory and can see how blogs fits in".
  • "We want to try that, is there any open source software available" – there was in fact an interesting open source developer present;
  • "Its so good that you can get to do that kind of development";
  • "I really enjoyed the presentation" – although credit for this should really go to Kieran, Hannah, John, Karen etc for building WB and doing the publicity material.

There were philosophical aspects to my presentation (and Derek's). This actually seemed to go down well, and several people asked me about it later. There was even a Hegelian/Heideggerian (former Warwick Philosophy student) in the audience!

And some interesting points that were raised:

  • Compartmentalism – some people like to keep different aspects of their lives seperate – eg social and work, they don't like the idea of a single blog for everything – we should investigate this further, as it may be preventing many people from blogging;
  • We need stronger links between the blog and the formal objects that we want students to blog about (finished documents, work in progress, concept maps, plans, online module content, ePortfolios) – several people mentioned wikis – possible links between blogs and wikis need to be explored;
  • WiFi and ubiquitous computing will make blogs even more useful, as it will be possible to blog more imediately;
  • Warwick Blogs is creating lots of research data and interesting behaviour, it would be good to more formally investigate it;

The one thing that i missed out from my planned presentation due to a lack of time was a discussion of Warwick's development methodlogy. I think this is actually more than just really really really important, and worthy of a presentation in itself. But more interestingly, its actually similar to the kind of approach to learning that i am advocating. More on that soon.


: 08 Apr 2005 06:13 |  Tags:   |  Comments (6) |  Report a problem