CUIN 6397 - Practicum in IT, Summer 2006

As part of the development of the Dawn Installation Project, our class has been posting messages about our work and sharing ideas about some of the content that will be used in the project as well as some of the technology tools we're using--like this blog.

Recently, I recieved an email message from a university student in China who is using blogging as a method of online educational communication in courses at Tianjin Foreign Studies University--which I visited in 2002.


Although the student sees the educational value of blogs, as evidenced by the statement:

"I believe the wide application of weblogs on online learning in China will be more and more popular and will attach great value to the development of Internet-based education;" I was asked to comment on the following:

"What methods can we use to guarantee that the topics students discuss are only concerning the academic knowledge? I found in many academic weblogs, the result of the students' discussion has nothing to do with the initial academic topics."

Since one of the reasons we started this blog was to see how students and teachers can use these kinds of online comunication tools as part of our course, I thought it might be helpful if each of us in could try to answer the student's question from our own perspective.

Please post a reply to this message in which you discuss your ideas and then we can send the student our comments--and also perhaps get her (or him) to contribute to our blog!