Bio182

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Didn't use a blog

I decided that the management tasks would take up so much time, and the experience of blogging would be so little connected to the course, that it didn't make sense to add the feature. And I was right... So sometimes a blog really is superfluous, and not a better idea. Still, I'll retain the traces instead of just deleting the blog.

"Learning Diaries"

A nice summary label for this activity, but it really will need to be structured in order to be rewarding --can't just count the number of posts, or go by their length. The objective is to get participants to articulate what they're doing (and finding) as they explore the powers of various tools and expand their understanding of a topic. The more they are able to write about their own processes and discoveries, the better they will get at explaining significance: without practise, only the really clever are likely to succeed.
One of the problems will be comment spam, unless comments are closed after a few days.

Six blogs, not 40

It occurred to me that a blog for each student would be unwieldy, and that a blog for each group is a much better idea, and has the added interest of roping the faculty mentors into the action at the same time.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Katherine Ann Porter's novella would be a wonderful starting place, but it's not in the knowledge universe of W&L students. Here's a short characterization:

Already pursuing what she later described as a "nomadic" life, Porter lived briefly in Louisiana with her sister, and then moved back to Texas. Back in Texas, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, beginning a lifelong battle with ill health. If there was anything beneficial in contracting a debilitating disease, it was that while recovering in a sanitarium in Carlsbad, Texas, Porter met a woman who would later give her a paid position as a writer for a newspaper. Later Porter denied that she had ever been a "newspaperwoman," a term she disliked. Whatever the title, the fact remains that she launched her writing career while working for a newspaper.
In 1918, Porter continued her recuperation in Denver, where she wrote reviews for the Rocky Mountain News. She had barely recovered her health when she was hit by influenza in the epidemic that killed 500,000 Americans. Many years later, Porter wrote Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella about Miranda, a young woman working for a newspaper, who survives the epidemic only to discover that Adam, her beloved, has succumbed to the disease. Alfred Crosby dedicated his history of the influenza epidemic to Porter because he believed Pale Horse, Pale Rider to be an exceptional depiction of the suffering endured during the epidemic.
(from neh.gov)

Using RefWorks

It seems worthwhile to start the students using RefWorks, since we'll have a license and we need to explore its implications for the campus. It's a lot to ask of them, but I think the example will prove to be worthwhile. It also minimizes the hassle of producing bibliographies by hand, and lets us concentrate instead on the content of what they are finding.
It does mean that I'll have to make the support materials, and put a lot of effort into support for their attempts, but I won't have to do all that tiresome proofreading.

H5N1 as running example

I've decided to use H5N1 as the focus of my examples for the course, drawing upon the last year's collection activities (from my H5N1 logfile).
It's likely that very few of the students will have heard of "H5N1", but that some will know about "the bird flu" or perhaps "avian influenza". I'd guess that none will have thought about the implications of a pandemic, and that almost none will have any knowledge of the 1918 pandemic. So there's vocabulary to develop, background to gather, searches to mount and manage, and information feelers to extend --as is the case with any research topic one undertakes.
I want to explore the blog as a means to manage my own process, and I'm toying with how to get the students to participate...

]]> Does it make any sense to set up blogs for each of them, and have them use this medium instead of Web pages? I wonder... it's a lot of setup time, might strain the server, has backup risks, is largely unexplored as a strategy.