Blogging for course collaboration and discussion Monday, April 20, 2009

On h800 at the moment, we are using blogs for collaboration and sharing of ideas - hello fellow h800-ers, if you are stopping by here.

We've only just started blogging on the course, and I think the real advantages and disadvantages will start to emerge over the next few weeks.

But straight up at the beginning, I have observed one quite large inconvenience/inefficiency about the process. We're all supplying our blog URLs via the course forum. But obviously in order to manage potentially 20 or so blogs in an efficient way, we need to be using some kind of blog feed reader (such as Bloglines or Google Reader). Even then though, you have to add each blog individually and possibly a separate feed for its comments too (I haven't actually got around to sorting that out yet, argh).

I just did a little screen cast of the process of me adding a blog into the feed reader that I'm using (Google Reader). I did this partly because I wondered if it would be helpful for anyone, and partly to document just how long this took me. I think it's important because in terms of supporting blogging for teaching and learning, we have to find ways of making this seem simple and seamless.



(This is rendered small, or here's a full size view)

There isn't any explanation in the H800 literature for the week about what feed readers are and why you might need one, and this is probably an omission ..

How are other people getting on with trying to make the process workable?