Verbreitung von WordPress im Bildungsbereich

Hierzu habe ich in den vergangenen Tagen eine Liste mit Links zu (Hoch)schulen an denen WordPress eingesetzt wird.

Blauer Pin = WordPress.com Blog
Grüner Pin = Einzelinstallation
Roter Pin = MultiUser bzw. MultiSie Installation

Nutzungsaren von WordPress im Bildungsbereich

Als Nutzungsszenarien habe ich exemplarisch folgende Szenarien angeführt:

• Dozentenblogs
• Seminarblogs (LCMS)
• ePortfolio
• Personal Learning Environment
• Lerntagebuch
• Aussendarstellung von Projekten, Arbeitsbereichen
• …mehr

ePortfolio mit WordPress

Ich habe den Sessionteilnehmern kurz das Konzept der ePortfolios erläutert und hierbei folgende Probleme skizziert:

1. Mehrere Beiträge die das gleiche Passwort nutzen werden beide zugänglich wenn man bei einem das Passwort eingibt. Es fehlt die Möglichkeit einzelne Inhalte für ausgewählte Nutzer (Peers, Lehrende, …) freizugeben. Einer der Workshopteilnehmer (@karstenkneese) empfiehlt hierfür das Plugin wpNamedUsers.
2. Ein weiteres, bisher ungelöstes (?) Problem sind aus meiner Sicht Datei-Uploads in das WordPress System bei zugangsbeschränkten Beiträgen. Ist die URL der Datei bekannt kann man bisher auch ohne Zugang zum jeweiligen Beitrag die Datei erreichen. Hierbei handelt es sich zwar nur um eine kleine Gefahr, ich hätte es aber gerne etwas sicherer. Falls jemand eine Lösung kennt bitte unbedingt melden.

Weiteres

Schon bevor wir über ePortfolios sprachen haben wir uns einen Moment mit dem Konzept der PLE’s beschäftigt. Nach anfänglicher Skepsis gegenüber dem Konzept wurde der Mehrwehrt für die Lernenden schnell deutlich. Die Teilnehmer vermuteten allerdings, dass die breite Einführung von PLE’s eher an den Entscheidungsträgern von Bildungseinrichtungen scheitern könnte, die, so die Vermutung, eher das Wissen/Lernen in Organisationseigenen Systemen “lagern” möchten.

Zum Ende habe ich noch das im *mms entwickelte WordPress-Theme study.log vorgestellt und zur Beteiligung an der Entwicklung aufgerufen.

Neben einer konventionellen Chronologie-Darstellung ermöglicht study.log für WordPress dem Anwender eine bislang unbekannte Freiheit im Umgang mit einzelnen Materialien, eröffnet neue Wege kontextuellen Browsens, individueller Ordnung und geht damit gewissermaßen über den Anspruch, bloßes Theme zu sein, hinaus. Überzeugen Sie sich selbst – feel free to browse! (studyBlog)

Selbstverständlich steht die genutzte Präsentation online zur Verfügung.

Was müsste WordPress für den Bildungsbereich noch bieten?

Gleichzeitig möchte ich gerne einige Fragen und Probleme kommunizieren die bisher den Einsatz ggf. etwas ausgebremst haben.
Besonders der Einsatz von WordPress als ePortfolio scheint mir noch nicht zu 100% gelöst. Stichworte Zugang zu Material auf Nutzerbasis, Zugriff auf Uploads.
Vielleicht habt ihr weitere Wünsche an die WordPress Community?
In diesem Zusammenhang sammle ich nun auch ein paar Links zu Schulen, Hochschulen und anderen Einsatzgebieten von WordPress im Bildungsbereich. Ein paar erste Gedanken und Hinweise habe ich in der folgenden MindMap gesammelt.
Hinweise gerne als Kommentar, per Twitter oder direkt in der weiter wachsenden MindMap.

WordPress im Bildungseinsatz

Hochschulen mit WordPress Installationen/Nutzung

1. FU Berlin & Studierendenblogs
2. Uni Bremen (z.B. Mitmachnetz)
3. Uni Osnabrück (z.B. ZePrOs)
4. Uni Halle (z.B. Politik.Wissenschaft.)
5. Uni Hamburg (z.B. BASIS)
6. Uni Zürich / ETH
7. Uni Köln (z.B. MedienBildungsRaum)
8. TU Braunschweig (z.B. wi²-Blog)
9. Uni Augsburg (z.B. Seminarblog Konstruktivismus)
10. Deutsche Universität für Weiterbildung
11. Oncampus/FH Lübeck
12. Universität der Bundeswehr München & Blogs der Professur für Lehren und Lernen mit Medien
13. PH Weingarten (z.B. Seminar Medienrecht)
14. TU Dresden (z.B. Baublog)
15. Uni Kassel (z.B. Medienwerkstatt )
16. Uni Graz (z.B. eLearning Blog)
17. Uni Koblenz (z.B. Podcasting for Learning)
18. Uni Frankfurt (z.B. Studium Digitale)
19. Uni Bamberg (z.B. FoNK)
20. TU Darmstadt (z.B. eLearning Center)
21. FH Jena (z.B. Föbeltagung)
22. Uni Bielefeld (z.B. Vorsicht Soap!)
23. Uni Konstanz (z.B. AStA)
24. TU Dortmund (z.B. AStA)
25. Uni Regensburg
26. Uni Potsdam (z.B. Grellblog)

Schulen mit WordPress Installationen

1. Gymnasium Blomberg

Weitere WordPress Nutzer im Bildungsbereich (Volkshochschulen, andere Bildungsanbieter, … ?)

1. Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Ibero-Amerika / Spanien / Portugal
2. StaBi Uni Hamburg

Diese Liste ist vermutlich sicher unvollständig und soll weiter ergänzt werden!

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/

• Weblogs im Bildungskontext
• Mikroblogging im Bildungskontext
• Anwendungsbeispiele
• Didakische Einsatzmöglichkeiten

Ich freue mich sehr auf die Zusammenarbeit und bin schon sehr gespannt. Ich habe bisher mit keinem der drei zusammengearbeitet und wir sind quer durch den deutschsprachigen Raum verstreut. Vermutlich könnten wir parallel auch einen Beitrag zum Thema “Arbeiten mit Technologien” schreiben. Ein Face-to-Face treffen für die Erstellung des Kapitels ist bisher nicht vorgesehen!

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.

In my opinion the collected features might exclude each other sometimes, but it is a first collection and might be improved during the next weeks.

PS: During working with etherpad we discovered that there is a limitation to 8 users working on the document at the same time.

Intermediate Results at the end of the seminar:
(After approx. 40 minutes)

Existing Microblogging Services
- http://twitter.com
- http://laconi.ca / http://identi.ca
- http://edmodo.com
- http://www.cirip.ro/
- http://bleeper.de/
- WordPress P2-Theme: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

What does an educational Microblogging Service need?
Only prerequisite: 140 Characters per message

Features
- reminder for tasks, calendar
- grading feature
- messaging; possibly with personal messages exceeding 140 characters, or at least with the chance to add files
- viewing/sharing different files
- tagging — maybe offer popular tags like some blogs do
- groups
- contacts following/followers
- post only to groups (only groupmembers can read that)
- connection to facebook, blogs, etc.
- reach a big mass of people in short time
- searching feature
- archive
- Visualization, such as tag clouds or wonder wheels to visualize the knowledge space
- updates sent to your mobile phone

Interface
- easy to use and reliable What makes it easy to use? What makes it reliable?
- Web Interface
-clearly arranged

Else
- custom design so everyone can have their own preferred way of reading things
- many different clients (Twitter), customizable
- you can be the whole time without breaks in connection.
- you are easy to contact
- would make sense to integrate with a wiki or a social network-like platform. Wiki would be great, e.g. having mutual links from tweets to tagged wikipages and automated listings of tweets on that page, or so.
- you can write something what is maby not easy to say in reality
- live collaboration/like twitter wall for feedback on presentations
-free of charge

Limitations
- you need the correct follwers and need to follow the right poeple
–> only makes sense if used by enough people
- only easy to use if you know what you are dealing with
–> Interface is reduced but not easy!
- privacy problems?
- works only when all students take part. But they don’t like to be forced. (e.g. http://books.google.com/books?id=E3z5bfkO4ywC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#PPR14,M1)

The Etherpad Document is also linked from the wiki Strukturale Medienbildung.

The article is nearly crossposted at the seminarblog.

Since Blogs are an easy way to publish information to the web the use of them is still increasing, even in educational settings. The question for this seminar is how could blogging and microblogging be used efficently for teachers and learners. What are traps and what are benefits in using those technologies for learning processes? What kind of understanding of the relation between teacher and student are common and meaningful if social software is used in education? We will deal with different learning theories and how they adapt to blogging. You will also try blogging and microblogging during the seminar to discover relevant aspects for judging about the relevance and to take didactical aspects in account for future learning arrangements.

Links for this Seminar will be bookmarked at delicious with the tag: seminarappeltsose2009

This Course will take place between Apr. 7th 2009 and Jul. 14th 10:00 – 12:00 h (cet).

1. Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Goals)
2. Approach (Schedule, Tools, …)
3. Experiences
4. Findings

Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Objectives)

The Seminar was held at the University of Hamburg during Summersemester 2008. It was intended to be a Seminar for Students of Educational Science from Hamburg and for Students who are in the international MA Programme ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building located at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki – it’s Students are spread around the whole Globe like in Wey’s Seminar.
Thats why the Seminar was held in english Language and was originally structured in a way that it would be possible to participate with just an internet connection.
After two Seminar Sessions it appears that there where only Students located in Hamburg within this course. Thats why I changed my mind and changed some Sessions from virtual to physical where the students can meet physically in a Seminarroom.

The Aim of this Seminar was that Students know about different forms of eLearning and the advantages and disadvantages of different eLearning types, Plattforms and relations to different Learning types.. Also Students expectations from the seminar should be respected. One of the things the students requested was that they wanted to learn more about the tools which could be used for eLearning or at least to support eLearning.
Two ways where offered to receive credits during this seminar. First Oppurtunity was to create a small eLearning -Object or a “Multi-Media Snippet” where you can learn something and write a Essay about it. The other Option was to write a Portfolio using Blogs. All students decided to write a Blog during this Seminar.

Approach (Schedule, Tools, …)

The Schedule for this Seminar consits of 14 Sessions. The fist session should help the Students and me to get to know each other a little bit more and to figure out what previous knowledge the students had already.
One of the biggest challenges during the seminar might have been to try to define what eLearning is or at least which existing definitions describes it best.
With the help of images we created Groups for a coming up project work. Within this project work small groups where asked to create small eLearning modules to describe typical eLearning Terms, such as LCMS, PLE, … . We spent a lot of time for the Project work because every group needed time should have enough time to explore the own topic, crate a way to present the content/topic and do the presentation for the group and have a chat with the whole group on how they produced it and what they discovered during this process.
One of the results I really like is a Video about what a PLE is produced by Martina and Daniel.
I wanted the students to reflect about how and/or where they’re leaning or doing eLearning thats why we had a session about the personal learning arrangements.
We had one Session which was completely online but synchronus. We used Skype ^TM and Adobe^® Connect ^TM to get together.
Further on we had a On- and Offline Session about learning Theories. The students collected Information about different learning theories in the Wiki and gave short introductions within a presentation. In order to support these Presentation they tried to visualize the learning theories.

Beside Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism we also talked about connectivism.

Below you can see the technical infrastructure of the seminar. The arrows show some of the main communication ways using all the tools. As I said above all Students decided to use a Blog to do their ePortfolio. So I aggregated their Posts with the help of RSS into the Seminar Weblog and added Links to the students Blogs. By doing this every Student had her/his own Plattform to collect own Ideas, Resources and Media and additionally we had a common Blog which had all the Students Posts and the general Course information.


Experiences

Using a Weblog as a centralized Platform, in my eyes was a good decision. It supports a time based structure, just like the seminar has on one hand a time based structure. Tags and Categories offered a way to organize the content in a way that fits into the content related structure. Definitions and other general Information was stored in the wiki, ususally after having a broader collection in all the blogs. We used the Wiki also for collaberative writing what was pretty succesful. To achieve these goals we spend a lot of time for technical questions to get familiar with Blogs, Wikis and al the other tools. I knew these tools before and worked with them and I think this is an important point. A Seminar is not the right place to try tools if they are the main infrastructure in your seminarconcept.
Beside having theoretical Input research during the course the we had a lot of Learning by doing and Lyearning by teaching.
One good example is the Video about PLE’s I mentioned above. The students learned how difficult and time-consuming it can be to create a short video film. I mean not only technically but creating a short storybook for en educational video and discover it contents is one part and the other one is to create the video, dealing with different licenses because of copyright and creative commons, get it online or make it available in other ways. After that process sharing these experiences with the other seminarparticipants was quite a big job.

Findings

In this point I’d like to collect some things I figured out during the Course and/or like to keep in mind when having the next seminars.

1. Working with students is a big joy!
2. Spend some a lot of time to check that technical things work.
3. Students like to have they’r own space in the seminar -On- and Offline.
4. Care about (Students) privacy!
5. Choose only technical tools if they really support your goals!
6. Don’t forget about the content.
7. Try things, be brave but don’t bring your seminar into danger!
8. The teacher or should I say the one who is responsible for the seminar should have a good knowledge about the tools you want to work with.
9. Be creative!
10. Ask for and give a lot of Feedback.
11. Elate your course to work collaborative and share a lot of their information (seems that usually students think it is not ok to share information that much or work together on the same topic).

I am very interested in additions and other comments in any way.

Reasons to work with a Blog and Wiki in Seminars

I decided that i’d like to try to work with a weblog-wiki-combination for my seminar as I am always praying telling in my workshops.

1. While I am pretty familar with Blogs and Wikis I thought the students should get in touch with Blog and Wikis more than just comment and read stuff I wrote.
   One reason for that was that I’d like to read a little bit more about their thoughts about the seminar, eLearning and related stuff.
2. Another reason to let the students have their own blog was that I want them to be able to get their content to the web, more or less periodically. To write a Blog is a very easy way to publish information on the net.
3. The main question if you use tools for teaching/learning is to think about why and how you’d like the tools to be used. In my opinion reflection is a very good way to identify future learning goals and recent learning activitys. While a Blog could be used to collect parts of and Links to the Students Work and offers a way to structure and reflect these collections, it seemed to me that using it as a starting point for a ePortfolio would be a good chance.
4. Collecting, organizing and reflecting on stuff from the could be easily done with pencil and paper but there are some important things missing. It is not that easy to cope with Multimedia content an a piece of paper, but yes, you are right, doing a ePortfolio on a Computer offline is no problem, organizing important webressourzes is a little more difficult if your ePortfolio is offline. For me the most important aspect to do your Portfolio online is that you can collaberate, and communicate with others, share your ideas, get feedback, help and motivation from lets say all over the world seems to be impossible if you’re working offline.

I know that doing this ePortfolio with good content and reflection is a lot of work for the Students, but I am sure that it is worth it.

Give Feedback!

To get a little bit more Feedback from “all over the world” I ask you to visit the Blogs of my seminar participants and read what they think about eLearning, how they get along with that and send them your comments. May be there are some interesting Ideas for your personal learning!
Here are the Links:
Daniel
Elena (not much activity yet)
Guerro (not much activity yet)
Hauke
Juliane
Luise
Martina
Samuel
Sascha (not much activity yet)
Selma
Simon
Simone
Susanne

Coming up

The past few weeks the students collected a lot of definitions and quotes about eLearning and related topics in the wiki for this seminar and within the nxt two weeks we will have presentations of little learning objects which should help to get to know what different abbreviations are meaning e.g. PLE, VLE, LCMS, CBT, … or words like Microlearning and so on. All this will be related to formal, non-formal and informal learning and I am pretty sure you can find interesting Articles within the students Blogs.

See also Torsten Meyers Report about this Seminar or Owens 1 2 3 Twitter Collections.