Tag: blogging

More on Da Chen Blogs

I’ve been reading the various blogs related to Da Chen’s visit to our campus. Many students on campus (including at least FYC and ALS students, and likely others) are given a writing assignment based on Da Chen’s work. The blog titles chosen for many of these blogs are Da Chen specific. Here are some examples. (And, if you visit each you will see that the vast majority have only the one post.) My favorite is DaChenGoState; never miss an opportunity to show that school spirit!

http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ChenDa
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/chenreading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenals
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ALS103abl
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/wcotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/cotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachen101
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DaChenGoState
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DaChen15869
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/chencotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachencom
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/summerreading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/Reading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/myvalues9
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DA
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ValuesALS
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenqnn
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/colorvalues
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenbmmmallar
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/valuesoflife

This catches my attention because of my recent interest in the concept of teaching our students to be “net savvy” (as well as our staff and faculty). Will these students use these blogs for other purposes? Do they not understand how to set up a blog? Maybe they understand and are only blogging for this one course requirement and don’t intend to use the blog again.

I should note that are a number of other posts on blogs that have more traditional blog names (usually the name or unity of the student). But the number of Da Chen-specific blog titles really caught my eye and has me wondering just how much our first-year students understand blogging.

Blogging and Da Chen

Author Da Chen was the speaker at Convocation this past Monday night, and was by all accounts a huge success. He also met  with First Year College students, which was fitting since Chen’s “Colors of the Mountain” was this year’s FYC Summer Reading Assignment.

What I find interesting are all the blog posts by students in response to Chen’s visit on campus. Most (if not all) appear to be on students’ personal blogs and not related to class assignments. I haven’t carefully studied campus culture and attitudes via blog postings, but it was certainly noticable that Da Chen postings dominated the WolfBlog’s “recent posts” list most every day this week. It is great to see students capturing their thoughts in a way that lets the rest of us peek in.

ELI07: Documenting the Conference

The efforts to document individual experiences at this conference, and provide opportunities to collaborate are quite extensive. This is in addition to documenting the cohort and large group learning and materials.

First, a Twitter account (event? account? still new to Twitter lingo) has been set up for this ELI event and lots of folks are posting to that.

Second, anyone who is blogging their experience (or otherwise documenting on photo-sharing or social networking sites) has been encouraged to use the tag “ELI07NetSavvySession” so that no matter where the posts live, they will all be aggregated together at the EDUCAUSE Connect site.

Third, there are a number of “extra” multi-media materials being developed in parallel with the conference. For example, I will record a podcast later this afternoon that will summarize my presentation from earlier this morning. That podcast (and others, I assume) will be available as part of the conference materials. I also was part of a group that was interviewed by Diana Oblinger on all these “net savvy student” topics. I look forward to see those final products.

Fourth, all materials from the presentations (both general sessions and concurrent break out sessions) will soon be available on the web. Several of us have decided to beef up what was shown on the screen. Knowing my presentation would later be uploaded to the web, I decided not to clutter up the version I actually presented with links and references and copyright notices and all that. So what I upload will actually be much more complete.