Long pauses

I guess I've figured out that I have to go up to the top menu to start a new entry. Funny that it took so long for me to come back and see that. All the first year Aquinas students seem to have figured it out (check their blogs here).

Following

I'm not sure what "following" means. But I've just started to "follow" my own blog, so I can figure it out. What happens now?

Learning about technology (not)

I'm more than troubled by the fact that it seems that nearly every time I find something that I can use in my courses it turns out that its technical problems are not only hidden until I actually put students in a position to have to use it, but are also problems that nobody seems to have an easy solution to. On Blogger, for example, I've got a student who's been unable to set a blog up because while he's trying to sign up the program insists that he give a cell phone number so it can text him an authorization code: he doesn't have a cell phone, but when he borrows one and uses that number no code ever arrives. As far as I can tell, there is no help line or FAQ that deals with this issue. I'm stuck.

Or I set up a routine where student need to save HTML file to a Web directory on the university server, and it turns out that Word is saving HTML with strange codes for apostrophes, etc., and the students can't figure out how to fix it. Nor can I. These don't seem to be serious problems, I guess, except when you're in the position of having required someone to do something that turns out to look impossible to them -- and you can't help them do it. And you can't go back and say, let's do this another way.

Learning reflection

I seem to be learning things about blogs. One of the important things is that people seem to have completely different ideas about what they are, in a rhetorical or social interaction sense. "Blog" to me means a journal I write, and which is displayed entry by entry, in reverse chronology, to a specified audience -- either all the world, or a defined group of readers. It allows other people to comment, but normally their comments are, although they're "public," not actually read by anyone other than the blogger, because the only way you can see them is to go back to the original posting and look at the comments there -- which normally no one does. In Moodle, though, and other CMS programs (and perhaps other places) a blog seems to be understood as pretty much the same thing as a wiki: a space everybody can write in. The main difference from a wiki being that a blog is organized chronologically -- what you write scrolls back down the time till it's effectively gone -- whereas a wiki creates a continually evolving permanent text.

This is mostly news to me, particularly the part about the extent to which comments on blogs are sometimes seen as, or are effectively, public -- and the extent to which a blog is understood to be one person's voice (the resident blog in Moodle is particularly not at all what I understood a blog to be).

So I have a new blog

This is where I'd keep a learning journal if I were capable of learning anything.