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…

Exploring Other Ways to Comment for Day 26

Since the challenge for today was to think about using multimedia and other ways to comment on blogs I decided to review and explore some ways of using multimedia in this blog and for blog commenting.

My Voki

The first multimedia application that came to mind for today’s activity was the use of the Voki.

The Voki is a fun way of creating a talking voice character or a computer-generated avatar, but it wouldn’t be easily available for posting comments in a blog.

Sharing a Health, Nutrition & Wellness Lecture

The next multimedia option was using .docstoc. I’ve already included one lecture of my on the Ethical Challenges of the Medical and Healthcare Internet in a prior post on Discovering Medical Ethical Challenges Lecture on .docstoc.

I uploaded a new lecture to my .docstoc one that I recently gave on Health, Nutrition and Wellness, on How to Live a HEALTHY LIFE.

.docstoc is a great way of sharing professional documents, such as PowerPoint presentations. It would be more than one might need to respond to a typical blog post, but might be included as a linked reference.

A Look at Other Multimedia Options

I’d already briefly looked at several multimedia options for getting PowerPoint Lectures online.

• .docstoc - http://www.docstoc.com - .docstoc is a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. Upload your documents for all the world to share.
• Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net - SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It is the best way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience.
• Slides on Line - http://www.slidesonline.org - a digital library made for physicians worldwide to access slide presentation on most updated research and clinical disorders.

Two new Multimedia options discovered as part of Day 24’s post include:

• VoiceThread - http://voicethread.com - A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. They can even be exported to an Archival Movie for offline use on a DVD or video-enabled MP3 player. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.
• Scrapblog - http://www.scrapblog.com - Scrapblog enables everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. This service allows for combining photos, videos, audio and text to create multimedia scrapbooks.

Another Multimedia option that I’ve seen used quite a bit.

• One True Media - http://www.onetruemedia.com - One True Media an easy-to-use online service that makes consumers both producer and director of their own video creations. We offer an innovative and painless way to transform video and photos into polished video montages that can be shared with friends and family.

A Look at Other Ways to Comment in a Blog

I took a look at the suggested resources for discovering different ways to comment in a blog.

• Seesmic - http://www.seesmic.com- allows you to create video comments that can be uploaded to blogs using WordPress. According to their wiki you can also

Record one or more Seesmic video’s to a post.

Accept authenticated or anonymous video comments.

Moderate video comments exactly like text comments.

• Snapvine - http://www.snapvine.com - Using the snapvine Voice Player, users are able to safely communicate, in their own voices, with their online community with snapvine’s easy-to-use products that work on any cell phone, with any carrier.

Thoughts on Multimedia Commenting

I filed these under the Reflections & Revelations for Day 26
Continue reading Exploring Other Ways to Comment for Day 26…

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…

Once, Twice, Three Times Blog Skipping / Day 20 Following Links

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.

Continue reading Once, Twice, Three Times Blog Skipping / Day 20 Following Links…

Analyzing Comments on the Ruminations Blog for Day 18

The challenge for today courtesy Christy Tucker is to analyze the comments on your own blog, in particular looking at which posts generate conversations.

The idea of this challenges is that if you can determine which posts generated conversations, then you make be able to determine what made those past posts good conversation starters and incorporate those features into future posts.

I got out a magnifying glass, took a look at the comments left on the site during the 31 Day Comment Challenge and answered the suggested questions:

* Which of your posts have generated the most comments?

Most comments goes to:

9 Comments for My Edublog Diagnosis Bloquacia or Blogorrhea? / Day 7 What I’ve learned so far

7 Comments for Defining Blogging in Education - Day 3 of the Challenge

* Which has generated the best conversation? (The last question is about quantity; this one is about quality.)

In addition to generating the most comments the My Edublog Diagnosis Bloquacia or Blogorrhea? / Day 7 What I’ve learned so far post also generated the best conversation. Commenters got into a debate about how long comments should be

I ended up developing new terms Postorrhea and Postquacious

So Postorrhea would be an overflow of rather useless posts and comments.

and

Postquacious would be the long posts that perhaps should be new comments.

* Are there any patterns to the commenting on your own blog?

It is hard to say if there are any patterns, since all of the comments have been a part of the Comment Challenge. It does seem that people were more apt to be commenting in the first week and a half and now that the challenge is over the half way point, comments are dwindling.

* Do certain types of posts generate more comments than others?

It seems that more interesting or even quirky the title, the more likely that someone will be commenting.

* If you do see a pattern or commonality between posts that generate good comments, what can you do to increase those qualities in other posts?

Post that Generate good comments, this is a hard one to determine and one that I’ll have to look at over time as the blog progresses.

I can never seem to figure out which of the lenses that I develop for Squidoo will generated comments, or which of the blog posts on the My Green Doc Blog would generate comments as part of the Mom Blog Party.

Continue reading Analyzing Comments on the Ruminations Blog for Day 18…