Blogs in the classroom: Utilizing CommentPress for a case-study course

Joon Soo Lim, The School of Journalism

My teaching in case study Case study in public relations: online public

relations. One of the challenges

the lack of standard textbook too many industry jargons rapidly changing communication technologies,

and finally, Surprisingly, today’s college students are NOT

tech-savvy. Use of a Blog for educational tool

to facilitate inside and out of the classroom discussion

to improve students digital literacy

Blogs in the Classroom the use of blogs in education is on the

rise educational blogging business: Edublog

(blogging for teachers and students) Free without any advertising, come with 100MB of free upload space Powered by WordPress

Uses (Richardson, 2009) Post and upload class materials & information Provide cases and examples with multimedia clips Provide links to external Web resources Invite students comments or feedback

Advantages of using blogs in classroom A useful pedagogical device

Flexibility and the ability to recontextualize information (Williams & Jacobs, 2004)

Save time and costs (Quible, 2005) Blog-based conversation as a powerful tool

for learning (Instone, 2005; Glogoff, 2005) Promote deep learning (Instone, 2005)

Some issues in adopting blogs in education

Reverse Chronological ordering

All comments are displayed linearly at the bottom of the page

Even the discussion in the form of comments and trackbacks are not threaded

Overcoming the limitations using CommentPress

What is CommentPress “an open source theme for the WordPress

that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text column Digital version of Marginalia

developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book

Philosophy “Text is meant to be a conversation.”

Overcoming the limitations using CommentPress

Typical Blogs Blogs powerd by CommentPress

Reverse Chronological ordering

Chronological ordering

All comments accumulated linearly at the bottom of the page

Comments can be attached at the paragraph as well as at the whole-text level.

Discussion will not be displayed in a threaded or nested format

The comments are in a thread-style dialogue with one another,

Screenshot:

Chronological ordering of posts

Screenshot: Threaded comment

Innovation in the blog-based discussion

Innovation in discussion

Marginalia is not new in the history of book

Marginalia

What’s new, then?

allows multiple readers to engage with a text simultaneously, and to engage with one another across time and distance

made it possible to have the comment area move in the right hand column as you scrolled down the page, changing its contents depending on which paragraph in the left hand column you selected.

helps “capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin note” for class blogs”

Advantages

Make comments in the margin Next to the paragraph of the text to which

the comment pertains promotes dialogue within and around the

text Within: comment on the page as a whole Around: comment on each paragraph.

add “threadedness” to the discussion, commenters can reply to each other

Advantages of using CommentPress• Table of Contents

– Discussion topics will be viewable in a chronological order.

How to install CommentPress Install WordPress, then upload

CommentPress onto the WP-Content > Themes Then, activate the CommentPress from WP-

admin > Design tab Sign up for the Edublogs service

Then, go to presentation from the dashboard, and choose CommentPress as your theme.

Testimonials

• “Elevated the level of class discussion about those poems.” [CommentPress in My Classroom], The author of [The USA English Forum Blog]

Testimonials (cont’d)

“Providing so many points of entry really gives the possibility of a much more rich and nuanced conversation” [University Publishing in a digital age, by Ithaka, a NPO.]

CommentPress in Education: Some examples (cont’d)

Literary-criticism courses Critiques of Po

ems The Divine Co

medy: Inferno

CommentPress in Education: Some examples (cont’d)

Textbook writing Publish

chapters of one’s upcoming book

Jonathan Zittrain, The future of the Internet and how to stop it. Yale University Press (CCL)

CommentPress in Education: gamer theory (cont’d)

CommentPress for a case-study course: Case studies in PR: online public relations • Organize class lessons in

a chronological context • Provide cases and

examples with multimedia clips

• Questions or feedback directly on the chunks of text.

• Have students put comments on text or,

• have students respond to each other’s case analysis from their own blogs [i.e., Trackbacks]

Suggestions: Possible Use

Speech analysis: Responding to different segments of speech

References Glogoff, S. (2005). Instructional blogging: Promoting interactivity, student-centered learning, and

peer input. Innovate 1 (5). Retrieved July 18 from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=126

Instone, L. (2005). Conversations beyond the classroom: Blogging in a professional development course. Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education 2005. Retrieved July 2, 2008, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/34_Instone.pdf.

Johnson, A. (2004). Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs. The Internet TESL Journal, 10(8). Retrieved July 15, from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Johnson-Blogs/

Read, B. (2007, September 28). Marginally better: Software uses side notes to turn books into discussions. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol 54, issue 5, p. A23.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms (2nd Ed).Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Quible, Z. K. (2005). Blogs and written business communication courses: a perfect union. Journal of Education for Business, 80(6), 327-333.

Williams, J. B., & Jacobs, J. (2004). Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(2), 232-247.