Paul Lowe is the course leader of the Masters programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, and shared his experience using blogs with our Work Literacy group today. Here are some of the points I picked up:
- blogs act as the glue between synchronous events
- blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey
- every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments
- blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training
- there is peer group feedback
- blogs allow for rich media – images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed – by all participants
- blogs can also be emotional and playful
The MA course lets the students choose their own blog platform so that blogging can continue after the course; a nice step beyond the LMS-centric approach to academic courses. I also noted that student blogs are not used an assessment vehicle which should encourage more open reflection. To ensure that blogs and comments are read, the course assigns small groups of “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. This course is an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of online social media.
The recorded session is available online, just enter any participant name and leave the password blank.
hi harold
thanks for a succinct survey of my presentation, its always great to see what someone gets as the takeaway from a talk
the session is now up on the archive at
http://lecture.wimba.com/launcher.cgi?channel=lcc_2008_1014_1507_41
just log in as a participant without any password and it should load up
I love the idea of using blogs as a record of the learning process. I have written “learning diaries” in the past, but none of them have the fidelity and long-term usefulness possessed by a well-maintained blog.
Paul, we’ll definitely have to follow up on the “gentle hand” idea.