Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

Developing a Commenting Guide for Students on Day 29

The challenge for today was to develop an age-appropriate student commenting guide. Since I deal with college and graduate students, trying to get things down to the level of an elementary school student wouldn’t enter the picture, unless I put on my parenting hat (I have one that will be in third grade in the fall another who will be in first grade.)

I decided that I would start with my Six C’s on Being a Great Blog Commenter from Day 23 of the challenge and combine this with the current Discussion Board Guide that I have, written into the syllabus, for my online graduate. I also included the Grading Rubric I have adapted from one of the Online courses that I took. This could easily be adapted to grading blog comments.

Six C’s on Being a Great Blog Commenter

• Centered - Stay focused.
• Contribute - Share some information or something useful.
• Courteous- Be Polite.
• Credit - Give credit where credit is due. (Cite your sources.)
• Camaraderie - Commenting is a way of building relationships with other bloggers.
• Constant - Remember comments are permanent.

Discussion Board & Grading Rubric

Discussion Board
With an online course, the discussion board is where most of the interaction occurs among the students in the class; this is where you will get to know your fellow classmates often more intimately than in a face to face setting. Plan on logging into the Discussion board to read, post & respond to new postings several times a week.

We have a fairly small number of people in the course, so you should be able to interacting with each of your other classmates. When posting your response for the week you may want to post your own answers first before responding to your classmate’s posts.

Each week that there are discussions be sure to respond to at least one of the posts for each of your classmates, who have posted timely posts.

Discussion Board Posting & Netiquette
Since we all are likely to have different backgrounds and experiences in regards to bereavement, grief, loss and hospice, each of us is likely to be looking at different resources and areas that the others may not be exploring. We had different paths in getting here and so each of us may have different areas of expertise or uniqueness that can be contributed and shared with the class as a whole.

You may want to share interesting or inspiring resources from books, articles, video or other sources may be useful to help in learning material for this class or used with clients in a professional setting.

The Student Help Section for Blackboard has a good review with guidelines for Netiquette.

When responding to classmates’ posts, in particular, be courteous and focus on offering constructive advice instead of criticisms.

Discussion Board Grading
You will be keeping track of your discussion board posts and self-grading your own postings based on the rubric listed below along with the discussion board grading form. As you are posting your results be sure that you take time to reflect, and include thoughtful analysis of materials, insights about the materials read and/or presented as well as providing constructive responses (teaching) to each other.

Discussion Board Grading Rubric

Source: Van Duzer J. 2006. Discussion Rubrics, Introduction to Moodle Course.

Communicating the Commenting Guide

I like the idea of making the commenting guide a collaborative process and using a wiki. I think giving the graduate students the Guidelines on being a Great Blog Commenter with the Guidelines on Posting in a Discussion Board would be a good way to start.

If I needed to have something developed for myself, I would include the commenting guide as part of the course syllabus.

While I like the idea of using VoiceThread I am not sure if I would use a audio / video for my college students. I could see VoiceThread being helpful if one were trying to instruct younger students.

Continue reading Developing a Commenting Guide for Students on Day 29…

Blog Comment Strategy for Day 28

In looking at the challenge activity for today, I suddenly realized that I don’t have a particular Blog Commenting Strategy.

Prior to the challenge, I would comment under the following situations. I comment when

I find something or a post that I am interested in
If I think that an article has been done well, to leave praise
To leave a related link and share information.
To thank the blogger or commenter for something.

According Caroline Middlebrook in her post on Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy? there are several distinct goals when leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Caroline’s goals for leaving blog comments are:

Grab the attention of the readers
Grab the attention of the blogger
Develop my personal brand
Create some backlinks

Out of these reasons, I would only be using the “Create some backlinks” and “Grab the attention of the blogger” since this is the only category that fits with my other main reason for commenting, to share information. I hadn’t really thought about using blog comments to develop my personal brand.

If I start doing this, I need to ensure that my comments don’t end up being viewed as blog spam or Spam in Blogs.

More on Blog Commenting Presence

Michele commented on yesterday’s post, on Personal Branding:

…a big part of communicating about our brand and what we stand for, but we also say something about ourselves by the comments we leave elsewhere. How do you feel you communicate about yourself through the comments you leave on other blogs?

I realize that I’d set up a different presence for commenting on the Edublog Blogs and for commenting on Blogger Blogs

For Edublogs I am drdyer

I liked the Voki so much that I decided to use it as my edublogger persona. The Voki was also a way of creating bit of a different blog presence and blog comment presence from the one that I use for Blogger, perhaps to create a new presence for my edublog.

For Blogger Blogs I am Kirsti A. Dyer (probably going back to Kirsti A. Dyer, MD)

My Blogger presence uses a real photo of myself that is a couple of years old. This is the photo and the name that I use professionally , so the Blogger presence is more of a professional representation.

Answering Michele’s question: How do you feel you communicate about yourself through the comments you leave on other blogs?

I think that my blog personas send out a strong ‘professional’ message, so much so that it may discourage others (particularly in my Blogger blogs) from commenting. Since my Personal Branding, or Strong Internet Presence involves my background, my credentials and my professional degrees, I don’t believe I could do this any differently, unless I were to create a different “Mom Blogger” persona for use in a more personal setting.

Continue reading Blog Comment Strategy for Day 28…

Commenting in a Foreign Country Day 24

It took me a bit of reflecting to figure out why this challenge–posting a message in a foreign language–was more challenging for me than most and why I ended up modifying the challenge.

Many of the people in my family of origin speak Finnish as a first language (my mother, aunt, uncles and many cousins), so when I was learning foreign languages in school, I always wanted to make sure that when I spoke or wrote the language, it was perfect.

Even with using Google Translator, which would assist in reading a foreign language blog post as well as translating comments into the proper language, I still felt extremely uncomfortable about posting in a foreign language. When I played with the Google Translator and ended up with responses written in languages using different characters, I was even less sure about posting the characters.

I then decided that if I am going to be commenting on a blog post (which I haven’t be doing a lot of), it would be better to post on a blog from someone in the challenge, so I morphed the activity to being one where I would post a comment on a blog from one of the 31 Day Challenge Participants that was being written in a foreign country.

Chosen Blogs & Comments

• Brian Lockwood, How? What? Questions for Lifelong Learning, blogging from Yokohama, Japan. A comment was left on the April 21st post Are Web 2.0 sites Electronic Portfolios friendly?
• Leigh Newton, Leigh in Azerbaijan Looking at the Country and Education, blogging from Baku, Azerbaijan. A comment was left on his May 14th post on Artistic Shoes
• Adrienne Michetti, create. connect. question, blogging from Hanoi, Vietnam. A comment was left on her May 11th post on I believe in global education, BUT…
• Sarah Stewart, Sarah’s Musings blogging from Dunedin, New Zealand. A comment was left on her May 24th post on Comment Challenge Day 17: Commenting on Five blogs in Five minutes. (O.K. this last one wasn’t strictly a foreign language, but Sarah had visited my blog a few days ago and I decide to stop by hers.

The simple sentence that I decide to have translated was: “Greetings from the 31 Day Comment Challenge.”

• In Japanese 日からのご挨拶コメントの挑戦です。
• In Azerbaijani wasn’t an option. Had to go with Russian, Поздравления с Днем 31 Комментировать обстоятельства.
• In Vietnamese. (I used http://vdict.com to translate the Vietnamese into English) Những lời chào từ 31 Thách thức Bình luận Ngày
• In New Zealand. (I picked Maori from the page “Hello in Many Languages“) Tena koe from the 31 Day Challenge.

After seeing the translations in foreign alphabets, I decided to keep the translations just for this post, since I didn’t know if posting text in a foreign alphabet would just end up a garbled HTML mess. So I posted a simple “Hi” in the language of the blog and the fact that I was posting from the 31 Day Challenge.

Continue reading Commenting in a Foreign Country Day 24…

Ruminations Blog Audit / Day 10: Audit Comments on Your Own Blog

Today’s task was very interesting. The challenge was to do a self audit of your blog analyzing why people might not be commenting on your blog.

Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog
1. You sound like a press release.
2. You sound like an infomercial.
3. You sound like a know-it-all.
4. You haven’t showed them how.
5. You haven’t created the right atmosphere.
6. You just don’t seem that into it.

Audit Discoveries

I made three major discoveries from my blog audit.

1. That I am a multiblogger.

2. That because of my background, I would be considered to be a Blogspert (Blog Topic Expert), or perhaps more accurately, a BlogDoc.

3. I might be considered to be a poor blog host, because I haven’t set any instructions or given blog comment posters any directions.

Multiblogging

In looking through blogging terms, I discovered that I am a Multiblogger, or a person that runs multiple blogs. The main reason for multiblogging is that I have varied non- overlapping interests that don’t lend themselves to creating a single blog.

• Grief, Loss & Transitions - Blogging on topics related to Grief, Loss and Transitions.
• My Green Doc Blog - A Blog devotes to writing about many healthy things that are green.
• NICU Parent Support Blog - Reflections, Ruminations & Resources from respected physician, educator, author and former NICU Parent.
• Nutrition & Wellness Blog - An edublog established for Bio 50, the Nutrition & Wellness course taught by Dr. Kirsti A. Dyer at Columbia College.

Blogspert, Blogdoc

Michele comments that “…no one is attracted to a know-it-all.” Part of the reason for me in creating blogs has been to share information. I am not exactly sure what to do about this particular reason for people not leaving comments.

I think I also struggle with being perceived as ‘practicing medicine’ online. This isn’t as much of an issue as it was in the early online days when people were trying to define Medicine and the Ethics on the Internet.

Continue reading Ruminations Blog Audit / Day 10: Audit Comments on Your Own Blog…

Comments vs. Junk vs. Spam in Blogs / Day 9 Should We Be Commenting on Blogs?

When is a message posted in a blog considered a ‘comment’ and when it is ’spam’? This is the task for today’s challenge.

The purpose of the 31 Day Comment Challenge was to “improve our commenting skills and draw more people into blog conversations.”

While this may be happening with this group of educators, it may not be happening with all blogs and all other groups.

Comments vs. Junk vs. Spam

Blog Comments - These are the types of posts a blogger would like to see. Messages that interact, praise, ask for clarification or sharing advice are the types of messages that build community and communication.

Blog Junk - These are the messages that are somewhere between communication and spam. They may be a little more difficult to recognize as a good comment. These may have some related information to the post but are may be more for advertising purposes or generating links to a website. I see this with some of the comments left on my lenses in the Squidoo Community.

Blog Spam or Spam in Blogs - According to Wikipedia Spam in blogs, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site’s ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links.

Prior Experience with Blog Spammers

Prior to this I have not been the greatest fan of comments. My NICU Parent Support Blog fell prey to some spam bloggers who posted pornographic links (not the best thing for NICU Parents to see). I had to go in and re-publish articles to get rid of the comments.

I learned the hard way to make sure that the comments settings were set to have all comments moderated prior to posting.

Purpose of Commenting

The other part of the challenge was to reflect on the purpose of comments in blogs.

I think that commenting, praising, asking for clarification or sharing advice in a blog comment is great. This type of interaction is the type that helps to build community.

Continue reading Comments vs. Junk vs. Spam in Blogs / Day 9 Should We Be Commenting on Blogs?…