The MOE ExCEL Fest 2005 starts today and Nan Chiau High School has 2 projects (“Harnessing Edublogs” and “CERDIK”) participating in the SchoolWorks! section exhibition.
ExCEL stands for Excellence through Continuous Enterprise and Learning, and parents and the public will be here to experience schools� innovative efforts in teaching and learning.
If you will be here (Suntec Convention Centre) today or tomorrow, do visit us 🙂
Oh btw, we are also setting up some laptops for visitors to have a hands-on blogging experience! Yup, the “5 minutes, 3 steps blogger blog creation“.
WebQuest – QuestGarden
Read this post off Craig Nansen’s blog, which is about Bernie Dodge’s presentation at the NECC.
The tool seems to combine the advantages of a blog (ease of use, template driven), a wiki (collaborative development) and development tools (templates, themes and design patterns) built in. A number of different authors can work on the same WebQuest, and it is hosted on his server so that FTP software is not needed. He is also planning on having a graphics library so teachers can easily add graphics to their WebQuests.
URLs:
“Garden WebQuest – Unveiled” posting
The WebQuest Page at San Diego State University
Blogger.com – Direct uploading of graphics/pictures
Great piece of news via Search Engine Journal, finally, we can upload photos directly to blogger.com blogs, just like in MSN spaces, no more messy installing of hello!/picasa clients.
If you have a blogger blog, do check out the latest functionality.
National Interschool Blogging Championship 2005 commences today !
After months of preparation, the long-awaited NIBC starts today! Some 53 schools are involved in this preliminary round, which will last till 31 July.
While I am typing, some students must be busy posting away, while others may be busy gathering more peers to join their group blogs.
Join in the excitement now!
BlogTalk DU – consolidating learning points (part 3)
more bits of the fast fading limited understanding …
5. Marcus O�Donnell on ‘Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology‘
this is one of the paper i personally find very thought-provoking and provided me with insights from a broad perspective. marcus looked at the broad theoretical models (from bloom’s taxonomy to seymour papert’s constructionism) and tried to draw their significance in the use of blogging. he also touched on metaphors that are related to deep/surface models of learning. he ended off by suggesting the implementation of course-wide blogs which “would evolve together with (and record) the student’s learning and practice experience”
I believe we will only unleash the full practical potential of blogging when we pay due attention to its place in this complex field of new communicative practices. We need to look at blogging, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a broad palette of
�cybercultural� practices, which provide us with both new ways of
doing and new ways of thinking…… At the material and experiential level participation in cybercultures occurs along a continuum that begins with activities which are now almost ubiquitous such as web surfing, email and googling, the use of more specialist techniques such as RSS feeds, instant messaging, peer-to-peer file transfer and podcasting through to participation in emergent movements such as those centred around open-source software or creative commons, �copyleft� initiatives…… So how does blogging change the way we think? How does it embody the virtual, dynamic, emergent and idiosyncratic characteristics of cyberdiscursivity?
6. Ian MacColl et al. on ‘Reflections on reflection: Blogging in undergraduate design studios‘
this paper gave a very good overview of integrating blogs into two two design-based degree courses. we can look at it as another example of use of blogs for portfolio building. a successful one in fact 🙂
7. Angela Thomas on ‘Fictional Blogging and the Narrative Identities of Adolescent Girls‘
a pity angela was sick and unable to present this paper. after reading it, i have gotten a good understanding of the typology of blog fiction as an emergent genre. it is interesting to learn that the girls involved in the study are actually “authoring versions of themselves as they write in their role”. wondering if this “fusing/hybrid identities” is common or typically the case in blog fictions. how wonderful if we can introduce this form of writing to our classroom lessons, not only will we be cultivating creativity and imagination, some form of collaborative effort is in place if students were allowed to develop character diaries.