Breakout Session 5: Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools
Martin Fenner
Thursday, 24 July 2008 21:27 UTC
Martin Fenner, Oliver Obst and Jeff Marlow
We will discuss the role that science blogs and online forums are having in teaching science today. In a panel discussion we will look at practical examples and examine their potential as well as their shortcomings. To foster the use of these online tools in teaching, we hope to come up with a list of suggestions for both educators and software developers at the end of the session.
I would like to use this forum topic to prepare for the session at the conference. We will have only 45 minutes, so it would be great if we could get an interesting discussion going before the meeting.
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The blog post PubMed Instruction: Classroom vs. Online Instruction from the Krafty Librarian seems to be relevant to this discussion. Online training can be a good alternative to classroom training, at least for learning how to use PubMed.
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I’ve posted a slideshare presentation of the short talk I plan to give at the conference. I will discuss my experience with the Good Paper Journal Club, including some of the teaching and technical challenges that I see. Please comment here, so that I can include your feedback in the session.
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Martin, this looks very good. Congrats on getting it done so early! I could see a couple of other related issues to discuss, not necessarily with a slide: motivating the journal club leaders/moderators – they’re possibly beyond the point where course credit matters – and rotation of subject matters. Of course it’s possible to restrict topics, but it’s a particular issue on NN because of its broad base.
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Heather, I first thought that we as moderators / teachers should work harder to find and discuss interesting papers. But then I remembered that this is Web 2.0. We should provide a platform that makes it easy and interesting for users / students to participate. And active user participation is probably the best reward for every blogger and teacher.
I would be interested to hear what motivates undergraduate and graduate students to blog or comment. And what should be done to increase this motivation.
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Martin, the PubMed instruction you noted seemed to work quite well. I think that’s tremendously difficult to get students attention because the’re so short of time and everything is about getting credits. So any obligatory course which they could master in there spare time should work well. The more fun the better. You will get them into discussions if the topic is important to their everydays life. We’ve got the most comments when blogging on study fees and coffee prices.
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It’s true: the prevailing attitude among students is that if it won’t help me graduate/write my thesis/get a better grade, it’s simply not worth doing. When I tell some of my peers that I’m blogging, the most common response is “wow, you must have a lot of free time!”
So how to increase blog-related motivation? Is that even something that is universally worthwhile? Should efforts be focused on enouraging students to write blogs, read blogs, comment on blogs, or all of the above? Seems to me that the answer to this question is case-dependent. It might be more time-effective for research students to get in on pre-existing blog conversations rather than write their own. On the other hand, a science journalism student might do well to start his/her own, focusing on a particular theme or issue.
One promising way to encourage blog participation is to emphasize blogs as a tool rather than an end in themselves. They’re a great way to get cutting edge information and talk with important players for class assignments (though issues of accurate citations, etc. would need to be monitored).
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Jeff, I like the term blog-related motivation :). You mentioned some good reasons. One other idea would be to integrate blog writing into the curriculum, so that students could earn credits for their blogging “homework”. Blogging could also lead to invitations to talk at a seminar, something that looks good on every CV.
Because we will only have 45 minutes, we should maybe focus on a particular question. The recurring theme in this discussion thread seems to be: how can we increase student participation in science blogs?
We should have a whiteboard (real or virtual) at the meeting and collect ideas that try to address this question.
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I want to add a recent blog post by John Hawks about blogging by graduate students: Graduate students and blogging.
He talks about several interesting topics: is blogging a waste of time? Should students blog under a pseudonym? And he advocates to blog the dissertation (or at least parts of it). Something that Attila Csordas (who will also be at the conference) is already doing.
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I have uploaded a first raw version of my presentation at SlideShare
Please feel free to comment.
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Oliver, I like your calculation of time spent per visitor. Cost is unfortately a factor in teaching. And wikis and blogs are just much better in this. I also like your observation that wikis are better than blogs for questions that are repeatedly asked in your library.
Meredith Farkas just published a blog entry called Teaching online with Drupal. Many interesting observations on online teaching by a librarian and a very positive experience with blogging. The online class for that course can be found here.
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