See the link to the FLI Lincoln blog on my home page.

Maurice

No actually it going well – at least in the sense that have a regular routine of posts that is pretty impressive. We don’t yet have a following and that is a bit of a worry, the number of hits is building slowly but overwhelmingly from off campus. I even worry about the wisdom of the energy we are investing in the blog as a team. Doubting Thomas, if one was to be biblical, still I need to have faith that it will slowly gain traction with our real target audience in LU.

I think about the need for FOC to be driving the blog rather than the target of it but that is unrealistic?  I talk to individuals and invite them to contribute but no. I speak the wrong culture. Last night I re-read the narrative on Moodle.org about the pretty good teacher. I think I’m just impatient…

Well back to work

We’ve just made another post on the flilincoln blog site that profiles one of the blended learning courses we’ve been working on at Flexible Learning here at LU. It’s part of trying to engage with faculty about the use of online tools as part of their teaching-learning resources. A small tile in the mosaic of building a new culture on the Faculty of Commerce. It’s an interesting experience. Like any change process there are early adopters, most people, and the tardy – a kind of normal distribution I guess.

We’ve put a lot of work into the early adopters in  the belief that they will show their peers the potential of blended learning as a paradigm for course delivery. We’ve also tried to demonstrate in practice how ‘social media’ – are there any media that are not social? – can be used collaboratively. We’ve tried wikis for brainstorming ideas for course development on several occasions with zero results. Shelved those for the moment to focus on our blog. We want lecturers to try blogs in their courses so we need to model the practice.

Our discussion this week – off line, over the tea cups, etc.,  – has been on the merits of a ‘course of the month’ that would highlight people and courses on our Learn (Moodle) site that models good learning/teaching practice. We modified that partly out of fear that we might soon run out of model courses and not be able to sustain the momentum! Or we’d be forced to revert to activities by the few early adopters. And risk alienating them from the ‘most people’ group.

We talked about that a bit – alienating the early adopters. We get indirect feedback already that ‘Prof. Einstein’, who is going all out for blended learning in his courses, is a nutter. Our positive spin on that is that the new culture will not be built painlessly – the criticism of Prof Einstein is proof we are making progress. But that fact needs to be publicly applauded.  Hence the commitment by FLI to positively appraise the early adopters with our FLI Focus.

We thought the idea of the ‘course of the month’ has merit regardless of the risks but opted for re-titling it the FLI Focus - that way we can be more generic with what we include – maybe a whole course on one occasion, maybe a special feature of what is otherwise a less than exemplary course on other occasions.

And a couple of add-ons. We’ve linked the ‘winning’ course Learn page to our blog and invited comments on it there – with the approval of the course supervisor. That links a product of our FLI work to a related learning about blogging. As an added incentive we’re offering a lunch voucher at one of the university cafes for the best comment.

Finally we’ve advertised the Learn site and the blog activity in the FOC weekly email news.  This to engage the new media via the known media.

We know the theory works – now can the practice adjust itself to this?

The course we’ve chosen for the opening effort is a 200 level accounting course with a good range of resources and student driven activities around those resources. Well, that’s our take on it and we’re proud of our bias! Here are links to the blog and the Learn site – any thoughts? Sorry you’ll only be able to visit the Learn site if you have a LU user name and password     Whatever, I’ll keep you posted on developments.

There are many familiar things – drop down menus, links, icons to click on and so on.   As with any robust tool there is a fair bit to learn.  As an aside, I get this challenge in my work with online teaching/learning tools. Participants , at least initially, get a fixation on the vehicle rather than the message it conveys. There is much written on this of course – from McLuhan, to Bordieu, to Halliday (the best source in my opinion), Bernstein, and so on. The media is the message, the text is part, at least, of the meaning making. Grist for more mills along the days ahead.

So today, I’ve uploaded my photo – it’s a bit formal, but… – added an RSS link, which I can’t see on the front page, gone through a few of the blocks in the side bar – Appearance, Users, Tools, Settings, etc., added a by-line at the top of the page, edited my profile (too long).   In one ear and out the other if such a metaphor is applicable to the visual mode.

Replied to the comments people have added to my first post. I  feel a bit guilty because in my ego-centric world I have yet to go to others’ sites and see what they have written. Sigh… Lie down on this website and tell me when you first started hating your posts…

Anyone know how to get Blogroll to show on WordPress? For one thing , I have link to my other blog I’d like to show you.

Maurice

I’m want to use this for the Otago Polytech’s Facilitating Online 2010 course so… here goes