Ralf Appelt

Blogging in educational contexts – My MA Thesis are online available now

¹

Last month I completed my masterthesis and graduated in the international MA Program ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building. You can access all the content online within my thesis (blog) and you can also download the linear pdf file.

Why am I sharing the thesis?

I won’t call it a excellent MA Thesis nor the evaluators did. It is a product which has to fulfill certain formal criteria within a formal learning program. And much more important it needs to be finished one day and there was a specified deadline. In my opinion some theories should be extended and much more connected with the practical suggestions. But I couldn’t invest more time into this work before the date when it has to be submitted. I’d say the text is always beta and a good startingpoint and overview on blogging in educational contexts.²

I used a lot of online resources. That was only possible because people did’nt mind to share they thoughts and findings.
I’d like to share my thoughts and findings too. I don’t like to keep it just on my computer because it is not the perfect work. May be you have additions on it, just write comments or you can use the references or anything else from my work to enhance yours. You’re welcome!
There is a free registration needed to view the whole work.

Why am I using a blog as container for my thesis?

Of course one reason is that the topic of my work deals with blogging and that blogs could be used as LCMS, so why do not use a blog system to publish the work. Another aspect is that the permalinks, trackbacks and comment features might help you to have an easier way to give feedback or hyperlink and reference specific parts online directly. One more reason is that e.g. the tags are additional navigation elements compared to the linear pdf version.

Thanks…

I just hope you can make use of my work. And hey, thanks for sharing!

1. Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/britbohlinger/4223755982/[↩]
2. Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel-sallo/3617083357/[↩]

Web 2.0: Compact Definition

Immer wieder suche ich nach Definitionen. Ich bin sicher auch diese schon einmal verwendet zu haben. Vielleicht kann sie noch mal jemand brauchen!? Hier also die Definition des Web2.0 von Tim O’Reilly himself. Wer es etwas ausführlicher mag liest sich folgenden Artikel durch.
What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.¹

1. http://radar.oreilly.com/2005/10/web-20-compact-definition.html[↩]

A Day in the Internet

I’d like to know the source of this information bute the way it is visualized and explained is nice and impressive.

Created by Online Education

Via onlineeducation.net

Video about ePortfolios (and PLE’s?)

In Helen Barretts Blog I found this nice video about ePortfolios. It was created by Sònia Guilana.
Helen wrote:

This 3-minute video was created by Sònia Guilana, to explain eportfolios to her high school students (12-18) in Catalonia, Spain. Great images! Nice, simple explanation.

I’m just asking myself if this video could’nt also be used to explain what a ple can offer to learners.

Definition of Blog

I am currently working on a text about Blogs in education. Blogs, that means to me Microblogging like twitter and identi.ca, Tumlelogs/Mesoblogs like tumblr and posterous and “traditional” Weblogs like a WordPress Blog or S9y Blogs.
I would like to have a definition for this group of tools and I hope you agree that all of them are Blogs.
So my suggested definition would be:

A Blog is as system which aims to log Information on the web in a reverse chronological order. These logged Information have a Permalink and a timestamp.

My first question is if you have additions, comments or other good examples (maybe with a reference) to help me define what a blog is.
My second question is how one could seperate “the traditional” Weblog format (like a wordpress Blog) from the term Blog. Is Blog just summing up the different Blog formats? What would you do?

PS: Ihr dürft auch gerne auf deutsch antworten…

Explaining Microblogging

I am not sure if the heading is the best descrciption for the following video. In my opinion it is more legetimating microblogging than explaining it.

Vie e-learning Blog