The teaching of large cohorts of students can lead to reduced opportunities for interaction and feedback, especially with regards to group work. We have been influenced in our thinking by the way weblog engines make publishing, commenting, sequencing, archiving, sharing and dissemination of information an easy process for users. Most weblog engines, however, assume one author.
We have already developed and are using a prototype of a custom solution we called GroupLog at the University of Bath which can support the contributions of many authors whilst enabling a teacher or tutor to set parameters for when contributions could be submitted and when students’ responses would be published for viewing by a full cohort of students. In the context of GroupLog the conventional weblog article or story becomes either an activity defined by a teacher or a response to the tutor-defined activity by a group of students.
The JISC funded phase of GroupLog aims to further develop GroupLog and offer it to the community on an open-source basis as well as report on the feasibility of developing GroupLog as a portal plug-in (or portlet).
Derek Morrison
Email: d.s.morrison@bath.ac.uk
Institution: University of Bath.
Address: WH 5.38, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY.