Winchester’s Blended Learning Blog (2010)

Ever since I took on the role of “Blended Learning Fellow”, I have wanted to create a blog space, which provides a time line of developments in technology, and which is accessible to University of Winchester staff, advising them of what is going on in the e-learning world, providing them with access to useful resources and materials from training sessions. I started with “Blogger” as I thought it might be simpler to get people to engage, but as I am now teaching people how to use WordPress (and I’m more familiar with it), I have moved it to http://wblb.wordpress.com/.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
It’s tempting to move it to WordPress.org, for more functionality, but part of trying to encourage people to use the blogging software is to demonstrate what can be done for free…. so for now at least… As .com appears to be stripping out all my embedding code however, it’s a bit of a pain (I’ve just enclosed screenshots and links instead!)

Vision?
The intention is that others within the University, who are part of the Blended Learning Community of Practice, will be allocated access to WordPress and upload materials. A lot of material remains on the Learning Network (our VLE), and a Wiki will be created there for people to talk more freely about the successes and failures of projects, whilst the material that’s considered “publicly acceptable” will be on the public blog. Let’s see what happens…

How Preparing A Sermon is Similar to Writing Blog Posts

Darren Rowse, now Problogger:

“On Sunday I preached a sermon at my local church. I used to do this weekly when I worked as a minister years ago – but it’s been a while since I had to do it (funnily enough I find it a lot more nerve wracking getting up in front of a couple of hundred people to speak than writing a post for tens of thousands!).

As I was preparing for preaching last week it struck me how similar my ‘workflow’ for it was to putting together a blog post (although a blog post is usually a lot quicker in my experience).

This video identifies some of the stages I went through last week that are similar to how I go about writing many blog posts.”

Read the transcription on Problogger. I thought this would be particularly interesting for those who are interested in #medialit.

Blogging with WordPress #medialit

Here is the Prezi which I am just finishing at #MediaLit.

The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging

This slideshare is four years old, but the information is still relevant.

Blogs from #cmn10

I’m going to collect any blog entries that I come across from #cmn10 on here:

I’m expecting to come across more – let me know if you see one!

More StudioPress Child Themes

Further to this posting, I have downloaded a few more Genesis WordPress Child themes, still playing… not TOO long before a nice shiny site though!

Inspirational Students

Last week was the start of Semester 2 (yes, I know, just as many of you headed onto half-term breaks), and despite the fact that the week was packed, I found the week an inspiring one. Lectures seemed to go off well, I had 3, yes THREE, students come up to me after Creating and Consuming lectures to say that they were looking forward to the module/feeling inspired to think (do you know how RARE that is, usually you only ever hear the complaints, usually too late to do anything about it!).

Dreams and Nightmares

In Dreams and Nightmares, I suggested that the students set up a WordPress blog to write their thoughts about their lectures, seminars, and presentations they observed from others. Due to Validation requirements, I couldn’t set this as a compulsory exercise, so I wasn’t sure if anyone would take me up on the idea, but Phil did, and you can see what is already turning into a very impressive exercise here.

Media Studies Dissertation

In talking to Helen, one of my FYP/Dissertation students, it became clear that she loves experimenting with making YouTube videos, and also wanted to conduct research into the values evident in Sainsbury’s advertising, and whether these resonated with viewers. This therefore seemed a great point at which to USE YouTube to help her conduct her research, so please do help her if you can.

A Brief(ish) Introduction to WordPress.com

These videos are taking a while to upload… there will be 3 in total. This is my first attempt at making something “real” with Jing, a basic introduction to setting up a WordPress account for my ‘”Dreams and Nightmares (Britain in Europe)” history module – I thought I could give the students access here, rather than spending 15 minutes in a lecture room without a computer…

BBC Click

BBC Click is “the BBC’s flagship technology programme’, and a really accessible watch (BBC1 Sat 06.45 & News Channel Sat 11.30, UK). Interestingly, Click’s episodes are available for 12 months, rather than the usual iPlayer 7 days, so there’s a wealth of information on there, and there is an archive of written information going back to 2004. Of course they’re on Twitter.  This week’s episode included an introductory guide to Blogging.

Journalism’s relationship with social media has matured

Social media goes mainstream: So finally, being on social media has stopped being gee whiz and started being, well, normal. Manish Mehtma sums this point up well in this Huffington Post blog item. He notes that this process of normalizing will allow the technology to fade into the background — so people focus on the relationships created, not the tool. True. For the news media, I think (I hope) this will mean more embracing of tools as tools — rather than writing about the fact that people use them. Kevin Sablan, of Almighty Link, puts it well:  “Tales of journalists using social media, and non-journalists committing acts of journalism using social tools, are starting to sound like stories of people using their telephones.” Amen.”

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