[etugblogs] draft of initial post to ETUG list
- From: "Scott Leslie" <leslies@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <etugblogs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 10:04:25 -0700
Hi folks, below is a draft of the initial post I propose to send to the ETUG
mailing list to introduce the blog discussion and bring people over to the
blog site. Please have a look - I am committing your name to lead certain
parts of the discussion here (along the lines that are being laid out on the
planning wiki http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EtugWeblog) and
if you are not comfortable with what's being described you need to pipe up
soon. Please feel free to edit at will, this was just my first stab.
Also, in addition to needing to firm up the proposed topics on the wiki,
there's still an outstanding request to get me your bios so I can post them
to the site. We have under a week to go before the discussion starts.
Cheers, Scott
---begin proposed draft of ETUG invite---
Greetings, I'd like to welcome you to the start of a new ETUG e-discussion
on the topic of 'Blogs in Education.' You've probably come across a lot of
hype over the last year about these things called 'blogs' and may have been
wondering what they are and what, if any, uses they might have for
educators. Well over the next two weeks we hope you will join us in
exploring these topics and more!
Your guides for the next two weeks are a number of educators from around the
province who have al been using and experimenting with blogs both with their
students and as their own personal publishing vehicles. Brian Lamb from UBC
has been publishing his own blog for over a year as well as working to get
others on his campus up and blogging. He'll help introduce some of the
initial concepts of blogs and get us started. Crawford Kilian of Capilano
College is no stranger to writing, both offline and on, and has taken to
blogging big time, using them both with a number of his classes as well as
publishing his own thoughts on writing and politics. Crawford will introduce
some of the possible uses of weblogs and lead us through a look at how he is
using one in his online class. June Lester, currently with SFU Surrey,
teaches Math and produces the 'Afterhours' blog site. She'll help us look at
another use of a blog in an online class setting and also hopes to play the
role of Devil's Advocate during the discussions, as she's still not
convinced of the applicability of blogs in her own discipline. Laura Trippi,
also from SFU Surrey, has been working with online communications and
community software for years and her eCulture course is one example of how
far blogs and other collaborative software can be pushed. She'll help guide
us through her own use of blogs as well as explore some of the ways in which
blogs support community and communication. Laura Procter from UVic is just
beginning her own investigation of blogs from the perspective of a technical
support person on campus, and will share with us some of her findings on
what it takes to get started with blogging on campus. And lastly there's me,
Scott Leslie, 'blogger at large'. Hopefully I'll be mostly just in the
background trying to shepherd the discussion along, though those of you who
know me will sense that this is unlikely.
Unlike past ETUG discussions which have taken place solely through the
mechanism of the mailing list, we thought we'd try a bit of an experiment
with this one. With the belief that to really understand blogs you need to
experience them, we've set up a multi-author blog site in the hopes that it
will at least give you a taste for how they can work. We'll come back to the
list at the end of the first week and then at the end of the second with
some summaries of what's been discussed and learned during that time, but
the majority of the discussion will happen through the blog and its comments
mechanism. More on that when you get there. So please join us on for this
discussion - we're all over at http://etugblog.typepad.com/blogtalk/
We hope you'll join us there, cheers, Scott Leslie.
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