Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

I think it’s important that web design students create and post to their own blog for several reasons:

• Exposure to blog as a platform. Even if blogging as we know it doesn’t persist as a popular form of web sites, the functionality of a blog is still fundamental to a lot of web systems, for reasons of themes, plug-ins, content management, permissions, syndication, etc.
• A place to showcase work. A blog makes a great portfolio, whether of your web design work, or of your thinking about web design.
• “I write so I know what I think.” I can’t say it any better than Eric Meyer, for anybody in any field.

The latter two reasons tie in to my belief the students need to assert their own digital identity. When a prospective employer searches your name on the web, what do they find? I’d like them to find your portfolio. I’d like them to find what you think about web design. I’d like them to find that you’re engaged in the field of web design, that you link to and comment on the blogs of your colleagues. Blogging provides the impetus for this kind of behavior, and the web keeps track of it for you.

So, I explain these objectives and benefits, then direct my students to some blogging platforms, including WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and the UVU WordPress instance that I spearheaded while Director of IDS.

(I have to say “Real Blogs” in the title because LMS are notorious for providing “blogs” that–there’s no nice way to put this–suck. Or that are not even related to blogs at all. Thankfully the designers of Canvas acknowledged this and provided, instead, some interesting tools to help teachers manage real-world, student-owned blogs.)

In this course, students’ weekly projects could be posted directly to our discussion forums, or can be posted to their blogs and referenced. I obviously encourage the latter, because it adds to the showcase of learning, and provides more opportunities for exposure and connection beyond the walls of the classroom.

Archiving Articles through Diigo

The official blogging assignment is to post at least 3 times during the semester on articles that they have read and found valuable. In the past I’d maintained a wiki page listing what I thought were useful articles, web sites, blogs, and magazines that they could choose from, but I’ve recently discovered that the class Diigo Group archive has become robust enough, and is a far more elegant repository for this purpose. So now, if they’ve reviewed an article that I’ve not read or I know is not on the Diigo Group list, I ask them to also bookmark it for the Group.

Encouraging Connections

In order to encourage interaction between students on their blogs, I first collect all the blog URLs, add those to by Google Reader, and then export an OPML file so students can download and subscribe to all of their peers’ blogs at once.

I also grab the Google Reader “bundle” RSS feed, and add that feed to the Canvas Announcements as another trigger to read, connect, and share their learning.

Blogging Beyond the Class

I, like many other web design and development practitioners, am self-taught–or, rather, taught only through the open web. This fact keeps me keenly aware of the potential to waste students’ time in a formal classroom environment seems to me always a risk. This is just one way I think I can force students to engage in some positive behaviors that may lead to meaningful habits and leverage their advantage as they move toward their careers. I would be lying if I said I didn’t care if students abandoned their blogs at the end of the semester, but I think even if they only maintain it for the term of 15 weeks, they’ve at least been exposed to the blogging phenomenon, and, perhaps, have begun to understand how this field operates as a connected community of professional practitioners.

I also hope that by encouraging them to read and comment on each other’s blogs in addition to the community-based activities we do behind digital classroom walls, they might build relationships with each other that are collegial and persist well into their careers.

And, I tell myself, if they leave their blogs up, they will at least have something out there for others to find. And, based on the typical work of these students on their blogs, that’s something they can be proud of. I certainly am.

I maintain a Diigo Group specifically for my online Web Design class that, unlike services in a traditional LMS, doesn’t have to die at the end of the semester. Students elect to become members of the Diigo Group, and use the Diigo browser add-on to quickly share and comment on blog posts or articles that they find relevant with the Group (i.e. the class). Diigo also provides tools to tag, comment on, and highlight passages from the article (I haven’t required this, but probably would in a special topics class that focused more on new practices and methods in web design and development).

I actually first started this activity with a simple wiki page listing relevant articles that the class could contribute to. I also used a Delicious account with a for: tag that I linked to from the wiki for more current articles. Both were eventually replaced by this Diigo Group.

Diigo + Canvas

Diigo is the mechanism for both the bookmarking and the archiving of these web pages, and students are able to subscribe to the Diigo Group’s new bookmarks, but I am able to go a step further thanks to Canvas*.

Diigo produces an RSS feed, and Canvas can subscribe to any number of feeds. So I simply add the Diigo Group feed to the Canvas course Announcements. This means that any time a new Diigo Group bookmark is made, Canvas automatically posts it as a hyperlink in a new Announcement.

Students are able to control how Canvas automatically notifies them of announcements (e.g. via email, text, twitter, whatever) as well as the frequency of these notifications (e.g. right away, once a day, etc).

So, in addition to the Diigo archive of bookmarks, Canvas will keep a secondary record of all the bookmarks made in the Diigo Group for the entire semester. This simple act of syndication provides students with additional avenues by which they can choose to learn about new resources–especially important for students who may not yet be comfortable venturing outside of the traditional classroom space.

That’s the mechanism for the activity, but the activity itself is clearly founded in the first learning outcome described above. But I think there are some indirect benefits to this activity as well. For instance, I encourage students to find and read blogs in addition to web design magazines, because, in this field at least, blogs are the best way to share new information fast. Frankly, web design has little need of academics for the general practice; for the theory of usability and visual design? Sure. But most new information goes out through informal publications like blogs and forums.

Focusing attention toward blogs presents students a golden opportunity to be up close and almost-personal to web design luminaries like Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyers, Tantek Celik, Cameron Moll, and more. By following the writings of practicing professionals in the field, I hope students might develop their view of the field, and even fall into some indirect cognitive apprenticeship and accidental learning. And by engaging in the rich, deep, and sometimes contentious discussions of techniques found on web sites like Smashing Magazine or A List Apart, students will have begun participating in the actual practitioner community.

My hope is that students will not drop out of the Diigo Group after the semester’s end. But if they do, and many have, I hope they will, at least, continue the practice of bookmarking and sharing new articles and web sites to support their continual engagement in the field — using their own tools, in their own space, choosing whatever methods suit them best.

* I currently work for Instructure, makers of Canvas.

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