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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I wasn’t exactly sure what constituted a “Personal Brand” so I started today’s activity by trying to figure it out. I found Michele’s Martin’s post on Building Your Online Brand: Start with the Message. She looked at two aspects, a personal brand and the elements of your personal brand:

What Is a “Personal Brand”?

Your personal brand is the perception that people have of you, as compared to other people in similar positions.

The Elements of Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the sum total of information about you that people will use to form an impression of your value. Your appearance, your personal characteristics, your work experience and education, your strengths, your passions, your work values and your accomplishments are all factors in developing your brand.

For Michele, the goal of personal branding is to create a consistent, positive message about who you are and what you stand for that will make you stand out from the crowd.

Determining my Online Identity Score

After getting a definition of a Personal Brand, from there I went on to determine my Online Identity Score following another one of Michele’s posts on What’s Your Online Identity Score and What Does it Say About You? She recommended running a little experiment:

• Type your name (with quotes) into Google.

• Look at the first three pages of results–how many of these references are about you?

• How many of those results would convey the right message to a future employer or client?

I discovered 19600 documents using my name as Kirsti A. Dyer (my preferred branding). All 30 of the results on the first three pages were actually about me. The results were the same if I ran the search in Kirsti Dyer.

The results show my diverse interests from Journey of Hearts website, to teaching, to work with Grief, Loss & Bereavement, involvement with NICU Parent Support and the various websites where I have published articles.

One of the interesting discoveries was a post on WinterQuake Blog, Thoughts in a Bottle on the Ocean from last week that featured one of my old poems, Darkness from circa 1996. It helped me realize that the information that we continue to make available on Journey of Hearts, which has been online now for over 10 years, is still very helpful for those going through loss.

Career Distinction’s Online Identity Score

As part of the What’s Your Online Identity Score and What Does it Say About You? Michele recommended using the handy tool from Career Distinction to calculate your “online identity score.”

While I didn’t get a number the way that Michele’s example showed I did get the following response:

Congratulations. You are digitally distinct.

This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity.

I wonder if that means I got a 10 out of 10?

Thoughts on Personal Blog Brand

I filed these under the Reflections & Revelations for Day 27.

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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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The Challenge for today, Day 14, is to turn the Ruminations Blog over to my readers, so I am opening the blog up to readers and fellow educators for comments on the following question:

What are your favorite online educational resources?

What I am looking for are the resources that you routinely share with colleagues that help make their teaching easier, using computers easier or more cheaply, like on an adjunct professors budget.

My Favorite Online Educational Resources

I created my own list of Online Educational Resources that I’ve posted on the site as a permanent page.

I am created a permanent page of my favorite Web 2.0 resources (which will be embellished based on answers to this question).

With a bit of luck, I might be able to compile a very useful list of online resources for other online educators.

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