Blogging and teaching

On Sat­ur­day, 5 April 2008, I dis­cussed the issue of stress in the blog­ging indus­try. In this billso.com arti­cle, my topic is how I use my blog as a teach­ing tool.

My inter­ests in tech­nol­ogy, pri­vacy and man­age­ment are a good fit with two grad­u­ate courses that I teach at Hawaii Pacific Uni­ver­sity. My IS 6100 course is an overview of cor­po­rate infor­ma­tion sys­tems. I teach an advanced course called IS 7010, which focuses on tech­nol­ogy strategy.

After sev­eral attempts at blog­ging, I’ve learned that I can’t write a headline-driven blog that com­ments on up-to-the-minute issues. As I men­tioned on Sat­ur­day, I can work a bit ahead of the east coast news cycle by read­ing the major news­pa­pers online, just after their web sites are updated for the next day’s print editions.

While I can write and post an arti­cle in less than an hour if the topic is timely and appro­pri­ate, it’s not fun. Writ­ing on a tight dead­line is the kind of stress-maker that I’d like to avoid. I used that model for most of my blog arti­cles until 2 months ago.

Now, I jot down some story ideas, and edit the piece a few times before I put it on the site. I always have at least 10 sto­ries in my inven­tory, and they are in var­i­ous stage of edit­ing and development.

I stum­bled into this sys­tem of writ­ing after years of print­ing, fil­ing and using exam­ples from mag­a­zines and jour­nals in my courses. By post­ing arti­cles and exam­ples on my blog, I can point stu­dents to a grow­ing selec­tion of topics.

Social book­mark­ing

I’ve made thou­sands of book­marks and favorites in my web browsers, and every year or so, I was archiv­ing these to files. Back in 2004, I started using Blog­lines to keep track of arti­cles I had read on the Web. Blog­lines had a very lim­ited com­ment­ing tool that I started using to post blogs for my courses. I’ve been import­ing the best of these old arti­cles in my billso.com blog, so I can keep using these posts in my courses.

I also started using a social book­mark­ing ser­vice called del.icio.us to keep track of my book­marks in their web site. I can add or use my book­marks from any com­puter, which has become a big time saver for me. Social book­mark­ing ser­vices also sug­gest new links for their users, based upon their inter­ests. Lately, I’ve been using a sim­i­lar ser­vice from eBay called Stum­ble­Upon to save and find new pages and videos.

Knowl­edge management

In Jan­u­ary 2007, I decided to move my course-related blogs to billso.com so I could cre­ate my own lit­tle knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem for my courses. I don’t expect to make a liv­ing from this blog. The ad links on my site barely gen­er­ate any rev­enue. I use this blog to test and eval­u­ate fea­tures and enhance­ments. To remove the ads, I may move my course-related posts to dif­fer­ent domain names later this year.

For now, it’s eas­ier for me to post assign­ment announce­ments and read­ings for my stu­dents to this web site. The assign­ments are almost always papers. I haven’t been using dis­cus­sion forums in my courses. Forums are an inter­est­ing tool, but my stu­dents are scat­tered around the world. Syn­chro­nous chats are hard to sched­ule, and dead­lines can be dif­fi­cult to man­age. That’s why my assign­ment dead­lines are listed in Hawai­ian Time (GMT –10 or HT).

Also see my 28 March 2008 billso.com arti­cle on blog­ging as a busi­ness model.

Tagged as: blog, privacy, student, teaching, writing