David Carter-Tod, an instructional technologist at Wytheville Community College, in Virginia, spends an hour or so each morning over a cup of coffee perusing various distance-education Web sites and e-mail lists to keep up-to-date with the latest developments. And each day, he publishes highlights from his online surfing -- along with a brief commentary -- on his own Web site.
Mr. Carter-Tod’s site, which he calls Serious Instructional Technology (http://instructionaltechnology.editthispage.com), is his way of highlighting quality projects and research about online learning.
“There’s a lot of bad research (pseudoscience) out there on Instructional Technology and Distance Learning,” he writes on his Web site. “I intend to say so, and find what’s good.”
Sites like Mr. Carter-Tod’s that deliver frequently updated annotated links on a given subject are known as Web logs, and over the past two years they’ve become an increasingly popular form used by Web surfers to express themselves.
Academics are finding that publishing a Web log is a good way to share aspects of their research with a broader audience.
A typical day’s entry on the Serious Instructional Technology site includes links to two to five new articles or Web sites, along with a brief summary of each one. The site also includes brief descriptions of the author’s own experiences dealing with distance education. One such episode describes a “flame war” that Mr. Carter-Tod set off on a campus e-mail list when he asked whether professors should earn credit toward promotion for holding office hours online.
Occasionally, Mr. Carter-Tod even adds general comments about his moods, about his family, or about life in general.
Serious Instructional Technology has attracted a devoted audience of more than 100 readers, many of whom check in each day, he said.
Several Web logs focus on distance education and educational technology. Among them are A Curmudgeon Teaches Statistics (http://cuwu.editthispage.com), by John Marden, a professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and elearningpost (http://www.elearningpost.com), by Maish R. Nichani, an instructional designer who is consulting with the National Institute of Education, in Singapore, and Venkatesh Rajamanickam, a lecturer at Singapore Polytechnic.
Mr. Carter-Tod said he gets his share of fan mail from readers who say they appreciate his site. But not all the feedback has been positive. A site that reviews Web logs wrote that his site was a little too serious.
“While suffering through this blog, I felt as if [I] was trapped inside a LEXIS/NEXIS terminal with a malfunctioning mouse and three working keys on the keyboard,” states the review, by blogyou.com, which describes itself as a consumer’s guide to Web logs.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A51