Skip to main content

Using Blogger For Student Reflection ( Archaeology )

The Idea


+Sara Perry in Archaeology has been using Blogger to support a project in which her students create an "object narrative" that tells us the story of a museum exhibit. The project, in flipping the students' perspective around on the objects on display gets them to think differently about museums and exhibitions.

In a workshop, each of the students, having chosen an object ( from a crystal skull to a penny to a bike to a Christmas bauble etc ) were guided through creating a blog and began telling their object's story.

What We Did

We created a central aggregator blog that subscribed to the feeds of each of the students' blogs, creating a point from which the students, and Sara could easily get to each of the latest posts. We did this using the simple RSS gadget in the Layout Editor. Like this ...



The bottom half of this blog ended looking like this...


... creating a useful "Starting Point" for exploring the objects' stories.


Conclusions


Students were willing but initially far from comfortable with blogging, none had ever blogged previously. I was surprised by this.

Some students had issues with anonymity and their academic reputation when "reflecting in public". This view may be the more savvy. Next time we go through this process we may include a more involved process including the creation of the identity that is writing the "object narratives".

Whilst the students gained useful blogging skills, next time we will include an introduction to Google Reader and maybe a few activities to help students better engage with the blogosphere which, for most, was a totally new and alien environment.

The final blogs are linked from here http://visualmedia-archaeology.blogspot.co.uk/ but the students were marked on their final presentations, where they reflected on their experience and opinions about the potential for blogs ( and online in general ) to augment the museum experience.

It's worth pointing out that one blog was used as a "pitch" for a museum project and won.

It was a brief project, but I was impressed at how the students adapted creatively to the new world of blogs and developed interesting ideas of "how they would do it differently next time".




Comments

  1. This is the perfect blog for anyone who wants to know about this topic. The article is nice and its pleasant to read.
    Jesmond Student accommodation

    ReplyDelete
  2. The secondary data marketing is Whilst the students gained useful blogging skills, next time we will include an introduction to Google Reader and maybe a few activities to help students .

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Simple QR Code Stock Control Spreadsheet

At Theatre, Film & TV they have lots of equipment they loan to students, cameras, microphone, tripod etc. Keeping track of what goes out and what comes back is a difficult job. I have seen a few other departments struggling with the similar "equipment inventory" problems. A solution I have prototyped uses QR codes, a Google Spreadsheet and a small web application written in Apps Script. The idea is, that each piece of equipment ( or maybe collection of items ) has a QR code on it. Using a standard and free smartphone application to read QR codes, the technician swipes the item and is shown a screen that lets them either check the item out or return it. The QR app looks like this. The spreadsheet contains a list of cameras. It has links to images and uses Google Visualisation tools to generate its QR codes. The spreadsheet looks like this. The Web Application The web application, which only checks items in or out and should be used on a phone in conjunctio

Inserting A Google Doc link into a Google Spreadsheet (UPDATED 6/12/2017)

This article looks at using Apps Script to add new features to a Google Spreadsheet. At the University of York, various people have been using Google spreadsheets to collect together various project related information. We've found that when collecting lots of different collaborative information from lots of different people that a spreadsheet can work much better than a regular Google Form. Spreadsheets can be better than Forms for data collection because: The spreadsheet data saves as you are editing. If you want to fill in half the data and come back later, your data will still be there. The data in a spreadsheet is versioned, so you can see who added what and when and undo it if necessary The commenting features are brilliant - especially the "Resolve" button in comments. One feature we needed was to be able to "attach" Google Docs to certain cells in a spreadsheet. It's easy to just paste in a URL into a spreadsheet cell, but they can often

A Working Booking System In Google Sheets

Working with Andras Sztrokay we had another go at a booking system. This time it was to enable staff to book out a number of iPads over a number of days. You select the days you want, then select the Booking menu. Andras did an amazing job. It even creates a daily bookings sheet so you can see who has which iPads. To see this in action, go  here  and  File > Make a Copy (I won't be able to support you this is just provided to maybe give someone else a leg up, good luck!)