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Blogging Within Moodle
Meta-Commenting: This blog post exemplifies and models a more elaborate connective writing process. It includes a table, links to resources, and tags.
Author's Note to Readers: This is a post I copied and pasted from the Moodle environment into AU Landing, so the conversion of the formatting from one to the other is not identical . However, despite that, the use of Moodle for introducing blogging principles with students (tagging, linking, texturing, serializing, and drafting ideas in steps as multiple iterations, and capturing the writing process in more detail over time) can aid them with more effective participation within AU Landing.
Blogging within Moodle has some limitations, as it does not have the full functionality of WordPress. My own edublog hosted on edublogs.org, for example, has more features and a back-end administrative page.
As a starter tool, blogging in Moodle is an excellent foundation to practice the connective writing skills needed for reflective, cooperative and collaborative learning.
Here is a summary of some of the activities blogging can encourage. knowledge building consists of ways to foster learners' waymaking and sense-making activity (within Moodle).
|
Knowledge Building Activities |
Description |
|
Berry Picking |
Blog posts that involve identifying, evaluating and selecting resources; collecting ideas, links, and references; creating annotated bookmarks within Delicious, adding annotated bookmarks to profile page; |
|
Jigging |
Blog posts that describe personal strategies and experiences while tapping into data streams such as Twitter feeds, network wire feeds, network activity streams, and use of email alerts and RSS feeds; |
|
Piling |
Blog posts that detail decisions for classifying posts using Tags, categorizing posts, adding tags, keywords, and reasons for culling and revising tags; impressions of Tag Clouds of own and others’ blogs; |
|
Weaving |
Blog posts that demonstrate summarizing of content, embedding links into posts; adding quotes and citing sources from others’ posts, articles, web sites, podcasts and other multi-media resources |
|
Texturing |
Blog posts that explain strategies for tracking switches of narrative tone, voice and register; engages and addresses multiple audiences; provides textual cues such as highlighting, font changes, color-coding, meta-commenting, and layering (multiple revisions, comments interspersed with updated links and content) |
|
Path-Finding |
Blog posts that describe activities surrounding searching for, evaluating, identifying and selecting online tools, experts, and resources (hit-miss experiences) |
|
Path-Making |
Blog posts that describe strategies (what works, most promising practices) used for search and collection routines for using search tools/portals; posts that review others’ posts that describe path-making activities |
|
Sense-Making |
Blog posts that engage in self-talk, rehearsals, or pause-points, or involve pulling ideas into coherent frameworks such as schemas and typologies; posts that involve elaboration, evaluation, and analysis of ideas and concepts; |
|
Path-Sharing |
Blog posts intended to inform and share best practices with others and/or that involve sharing experiences of how they have learned within the network, and mentoring others on skills and knowledge required for path-finding and path-making; |
|
Sense-Giving |
Blog posts that involve passing along experiences and summary impressions, or which demonstrate modeling skills, mentoring, reporting, exchanging ideas, and acting as witness and observer and commenter; |
The Moodle blogging feature has a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor so it enables sophisticated word processing.
Bloggers can control the following:
- alter fonts types, colours and sizes
- add tables and images
- customize alignment and indent blocks of text
- add lists and tables
- link to other web resources
- embed HTML tags.
- add different file types as attachments
However, you will not be able to preview or edit the attached photo, so it may need to be cropped beforehand to fit the blog post width. If you intend to insert an image, you would need to first know the web address (URL, or Uniform Resource Locator) and insert it before it can be embedded in the post. You will be able to upload and embed other types of file types (images or MP3s) but only one file attachment per blog post.
Bloggers can also add tags that add meta-data (keywords that describe the post for easy retrieval and review at a later time once an archive is created), with both "official" and user defined tags.
Bloggers can choose their access settings, to ensure fuzzy drafts are not published till they are ready. Thus, bloggers can set their access privacy settings to either Yourself (Draft) or to Anyone on this site.
Another interesting feature is the full screen editor, which offers a whole set of specialized editing features for customizing tables. It makes it easier to edit text, and tweak HTML tags to customize the layout and formatting in more detail. I found this feature useful when tweaking the content in this post, particularly for meta-commenting.
Glenn Groulx
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