Shimabukuro, James N.

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Innovate: Journal of Online EducationVolume 5Issue 3 February/March 2009 Article 53-1-2009Innovate-Blog: Need for More DiscussionJames N. ShimabukuroFollow this and additional works at: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/innovatePart of the Education CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Abraham S. Fischler College of Education at NSUWorks. It has been accepted forinclusion in Innovate: Journal of Online Education by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contactnsuworks@nova.edu.Recommended APA CitationShimabukuro, James N. (2009) "Innovate-Blog: Need for More Discussion," Innovate: Journal of Online Education: Vol. 5: Iss. 3, Article5.Available at: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/innovate/vol5/iss3/5Innovate-Blog: Need for More DiscussionAll exhibits, tables and figures that have remained available have been included as additional content withtheir respective articles to be downloaded separately. Click here to return to the article page on NSUWorksand view the supplemental files.Unfortunately, not all the supplemental files have survived until 2015 and some will be missing from thearticle pages. If you are an author in Innovate and would like to have your supplemental content included,please email the NSUWorks repository administrator at nsuworks@nova.edu.This article is available in Innovate: Journal of Online Education: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/innovate/vol5/iss3/5Innovate-Blog: Need for More Discussionby James N. ShimabukuroI-Blog has grown in the last couple of months from 11 articles by 8 writers in November to 20 articles by 14writers in December-January. Our team of authors has also grown from the original 8 members (John Adsit,Claude Almansi, Steve Eskow, Gary Greenberg, Harry Keller, John Thompson, Lynn Zimmerman, and me) to15 at this writing with the addition of 7 new contributors: Judith V. Boettcher, MaryAnne Gobble, CarrieHeeter, James L. Morrison, Randall E. Osborne, Anita Pincas, and Bonnie Bracey Sutton. As we've grown, so have the range of topics and level of discussions. Still, as Steve Eskow reminds me, weneed more discussion to realize I-Blog's full potential. A lot more. And to accomplish this, we will need toattract more writers—and readers—who are ready to take an active, ongoing role in helping I-Blog grow.Back to Blog BasicsBlogs have been around for a while, but the idea of integrating them into professional journals such asInnovate is relatively new. A first step toward getting more of our colleagues to join us in I-Blogging may be toreview some of the I-Blog basics. Perhaps the simplest way to accomplish this is with a quick Q&A: How do I get to I-Blog?The URL is http://innovateblog.wordpress.com/.How do I find the table of contents?Click on the "Index" tab at the top of the I-Blog page for a comprehensive list of all articles. For themost recent posts, see the list in the right sidebar under "Recent Posts." Each title is a live link to thefull article. For a quick scan of the last ten feature articles, see the pull quotes in the right sidebarunder "Latest Features." Clicking on the author's name will take you to the article, which will appearin the center panel. How can I search the blog?Type a key word or words in the "Search" field located in the upper right corner of the page, justbelow the banner. A list of articles matching your search terms will appear in the center panel.http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710Clicking on any one will take you to the article.How do I add a comment?Click on the title of the article and scroll all the way down the page to read posted comments and addyour own in the box titled "Leave a Reply." Compose your response and click on "Submit Comment." How do I add an RSS feed?To take advantage of this feature, you’ll need an RSS reader. I use Google Reader. Once your accountis set up, you'll need to decide which of the RSS feeds you want to receive. (I get both): After selecting the RSS feed, choose your reader from the list of feed destinations. http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710Become an I-BloggerTo get the most out of I-Blog, take the plunge and participate: Post comments and submit articles. Staffwriters are expected to submit a minimum of three articles a year, one in each of the following three periods:December-March, April-July, and August-November. If you don't want to be held to a publishing schedule,sign on as a guest author when you submit your first article. Click on the "Submissions" tab in I-Blog to viewauthor guidelines. Submitting an article for consideration is as simple as emailing an article to me (jamess@hawaii.edu) via a message or attachment. I-Blog Is a Discussion PlatformI-Blog is a publishing platform that fills the gap between formal publications, such as Innovate, andprofessional discussion forums, such as Innovate-Ideagora. I-Blog articles are less involved than journalpieces but more formal and substantive than discussion posts. They provide a quick and easy venue forauthors to expand on topics of their choice, sharing concerns, opinions, tips, or thoughts. Articles are oftenwritten in a few hours and published within a few hours of submission. Thus, timely topics can be addressedwithin a day or two after breaking into the news; see the forum series on Michelle A. Rhee, for example.But more importantly, I-Blog is a discussion platform. It's a forum for exploring, at length, considered opinionsand thoughtful responses. Usually, those responses appear as comments on an entry, but sometimes whenthe issue under discussion is complex or contentious, responses may take the form of follow-up blog posts.For example, my December post on Michelle Rhee, chancellor for the District of Columbia Public Schoolssystem, "Michelle Rhee - What’s Really at Stake? ," was quickly followed by Morrison and Gobble's "TwoAmbivalent Views of Michelle Rhee’s Efforts ," Adsit's "Needed - A Professional Approach to Teaching" and "Poetic Faith—the Magic of Belief ," Morrison's "Worth Reading: 'Myths Left Behind' ," and Sutton's "MichelleRhee Has a Broom: Should She Use It to Sweep Out Experienced Teachers?" as well as a poll  that allowedreaders to offer their own brief assessments of the merits of Rhee’s approach and the likelihood of hersuccess. All of this material, generated in just over a week, continued to spark comment into early January. My articleelicited several comments: Ira Socol asserted that Rhee is not an innovator at all but rather “the perfectperson to preserve the status quo”; for Zimmerman, Rhee’s one-size-fits-all approach felt overly constrictingand ignored studies that show that students need “touchy-feely” teaching solutions as well as test-basedapproaches; and Adsit suggested that Rhee’s goals are reachable but the necessary changes must beapproached “delicately.” Morrison's comment, combined with input from Gobble, was expanded into "TwoAmbivalent Views," which generated comments in turn; it also received a pingback from Trinity WashingtonUniversity's President's Blog. "Two Ambivalent Views" led Morrison to develop a second article on thesubject, "Worth Reading." Each of the other follow-up articles also generated (and continues to generate) arange of comments; the result is an active, passionate, considered discussion of the challenges MichelleRhee faces and the merits and pitfalls of her confrontational approach. Another brewing discussion took a while to get warm, but it is quickly heating up. Eskow's "The 375-BillionDollar Question. And the New Agora," published on November 3, suggests that the answer to the costproblem in higher education, and to many other issues, might well lie in technologies that render the physicaluniversity obsolete. In her article "Access: The New Imperialism?," posted on December 31, Zimmermancounters that the emphasis on technology may well disenfranchise those who have no access to theinnovations that make such visions possible. Eskow responds in a third article, "The Campus: The OldImperialism?," posted on January 23, that buildings themselves, which require both enormous investmentand a centrally located student body, represent a kind of imperialism and shut out those who cannot get tothem. The topic is itself a carryover from an Innovate-Ideagora discussion begun by Morrison in July 2008entitled “Addressing the problem of faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructionalhttp://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710strategies,” which continues to generate comment. Expect more posts and comments on the topic in comingweeks. A Wide Range of TopicsThe controversial Rhee and imperialisms old and new are just a sampling of the topics covered by I-Bloggersin December and January. Almansi's thoughtful and comprehensive articles (see the list under her photo inthe left sidebar in I-Blog) on the latest developments and issues in technology and accessibility havegenerated lively discussions among an international readership. Adsit and Keller have both published atlength on topics related to change in the teaching of science, and their articles emphasize not only bestpractices but leading-edge theory as well. Osborne's "Defining One’s Diversity Philosophy: A Crucial Skill in a Changing World" makes it very clear thatthought-provoking philosophical pieces are not only suitable but essential in an education blog. In "A Modelfor Integrating New Technology into Teaching," Pincas shares an instructional model that can guide theintegration of technology into the instructional planning process, ensuring that need drives technology userather than the reverse. Her model is informed by years of field experience and practice as well as the latesttheories. Boettcher's articles, "An Interview with Terry Anderson: Open Education Resources - Part I" and "Part II," areparticularly exciting because they're the result of interviews Boettcher did at the Sloan-C conference inNovember 2008. In the coming months, we'll be actively seeking more conference-based submissions,including interviews, reports, and reactions. See the "Live I-Blog" entry in the right sidebar for a link to details.Finally, Heeter's "Adventures in Hybrid Teaching: The First Day Is the Hardest" is the kind of article that we'veall been waiting for—one in which the author doesn't take herself too seriously and is willing, as Almansi saysin her comment, to inject humor into a subject that is all too often treated in a glum, mechanical, and overlyserious manner. Ultimately, all of us have to discover the fun in what we do for a living. Otherwise, we're in fora long, hard, and boring journey.I think I speak for all of us when I say that one of the goals in I-Blog ought to be humor. The more we are ableto laugh at our own sometimes hapless efforts at working with the latest technology, the better able we'll be towork together, stick with the task, and see it to fruition.COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION FOR THIS ARTICLEThis article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document:  Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Shimabukuro, J. 2009. Innovate-Blog:Need for more discussion. Innovate 5 (3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710 (accessed January 30,2009). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at NovaSoutheastern University.To find related articles, view the webcast, or comment publically on this article in the discussion forums, please goto http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710  and select the appropriate function from thesidebar. http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=710

Innovate-Blog: Need for More Discussion

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Innovate-Blog: Need for More Discussion

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