Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

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.

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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.

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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.

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Today’s challenge is based an idea by Dave Ferguson “Three Links Out” or “Three Clicks Out.” This challenge is designed to help find and explore new blogs.

It’s a bit like skipping stones…one, two, three skips…but doing it by visiting different blogs. Finally at the third blog the task is to leave a message.

My Blog Skipping Adventure – Take 1

First skip: I started with my own Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD Blog (since I am spending a lot of time on the site thanks to the challenge.)

Second skip: The Edublogger site run by Sue Waters and read the post on Are You Making Your Life Easier By Using A Personalized Start Page? and decided I needed to spend some more time reading this post that I’d missed.
Third skip: Visited n2teaching and left a comment on a post about Lives of Teachers: Public or Private?

I think the emergency of social networking has really changed how people interact online. Many have chosen to make things public, that perhaps should remain private.

The fact that future employers and colleges may search online for prospective employees and students can reveal all sorts of things that might not be desirable.

It will be interesting to see if people start changing what they are posting realizing that what gets posted on the Internet suddenly becomes a public and potentially permanent.

I really like the idea of a Google alert for one’s own name as a way of monitoring what is out there.

Thanks for giving me something to ruminate about for the Comment Challenge.

My Blog Skipping Adventure – Take 2

First skip: I starting at A GeekyMomma’s Blog with her post on What Posts Stimulate Readers To Comment?

Second skip: I jumped to a blog on the blog roll Blogging on the Bay, Creating a Path to Techno-Constructivist Learning in the Classroom. I noted the prominent disclaimer that I may end up including something similar on my own: The opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

Third skip: I jumped to a link in the Blogroll for Diigo, another social newtorking tool that I hadn’t heard about. Instead of leaving a message, I decided to bookmark it for later review and did a quick review.

Diigo is an online community for learning people, where information, knowledge and community come together. The cool feature here is Diigo allows you to highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you.

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During the 19 days of the challenge I haven’t been as good about making it around to visit other people’s blogs as much as I’d originally planned.

I have, however, been very diligent about responding to comments posted promptly although not as promptly as Sue Waters, she seems to have lightening reflexes at times and for good reason, her quote is the inspiration for this activity.

According to Sue:

If readers have made time to comment on your posts, you should always make sure to respond back (ideally to each reader) in the comments on that post. This is very important for building your blog’s community as it demonstrates that you value your readers and their input.

I have to agree with Sue who is very diligent about encouraging bloggers and responding to posts (part of the reason she was one of my recipients of the Creating Community award given out earlier in the week.

Building Community

Commenting back on posts left to a blog (or to email messages) also increases community interaction whether the comments are on a discussion board in a classroom, an email message, in a blog or in many of the other social networking areas.

I see responding within a reasonable period of time to email messages from my online students a must for building community with online students.

I think within the blogging community, responding back to someone’s posts indicates that you not only value your blog readers, but you also value their input.

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