Other places

Some recent posts of note:

• At Design Observer, Jessica Helfand has some thoughts about the utility of having design students interview working professionals
• Juli points us to a great glossary of instructional strategies and continues her Auralog saga
• Mike reflects on the internal corporate barriers to introducing better-faster-cheaper training solutions
• Jennifer - fast becoming our queen of podcasting - posts part of a lesson for instructors on podcasting with Castpost

Splindarella makes some excellent points about blogging for classroom purposes in response to a post at Cogdogblog about the amount of personal investment needed for blogging. I've also struggled with this issue over the past few years .... on the one hand, I believe it's important for online instructors to understand blogging and aggregating and to get a real sense of their potential uses both in the classroom and as professional tools - and on the other hand, I find that only a handful of participants each semester seem to really gain some personal investment in blogging.

Individual blogs, collaborative blogs, directed assignments, free-form assignments, steady blogging, occasional blogging... it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference which strategy we use, the results always seem to be about the same - some participants blog just to complete assignments, some refuse to blog even when assigned, and one or two really take to it. Maybe it's just the nature of blogging, maybe it's just my approaches... the search goes on....