Hello KCB201!

I started this blog today as I fumbled my way through introducing my KCB201 tutorials to their second piece of assessment.  They have to create a series of five blog entries that discuss the unit themes the course is considering in the second half of this semester. The idea, as I understand it at the moment,  is that they write 500 words each week for five weeks and apply their understanding of the weekly unit theme to an aspect of their professional interest as they define it.

There was good attendance today for the first week back after the break, so most people have signed up to WordPress and set up a basic blog.   It seems to be all very straightforward, but I can see already that there are lots of options in WordPress for editing the appearance of the blog, as well as various widgets that can be implemented depending on your preferences.   This is quite a bit to take on board for those students who’ve never blogged before.  I’m almost certain that we barely scratched the surface of these features today.

One good thing for those people who are on a steeper learning curve than others is that there’s plenty of time to experiment with the appearance of the blog.  While it’s a good idea to write the content of the weekly posts in a consistent manner, there will be plenty of opportunity to tinker with the appearance and settings, to add links and insert media, to make comments and ask questions, before I’ll be looking at the blogs with my marker’s hat on.

This week the unit theme was ‘produsage’ the term coined by Axel Bruns to describe, among other things, the mode in which we participate in new media.  In my tutorial classes we stumbled across the website Produsage.org which appears to be a supplementary site for the second textbook we’re using in this course, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage.  I was glad to discover this site because it helped overcome some of the difficulties of access to the textbook that some students are having by allowing us to discuss the concepts in an informed manner (after a bit of reading in class).

I also noticed that Axel has a blog aligned to this site which is specifically about produsage.  I’m having trouble loading it at the moment but as soon as it’s available I’ll be adding it as the first link in my blogroll.

Tags: Blogs, Produsage