TeachThinkTech

I’m in the process of developing an online class for the fall semester, and have been reading about and experimenting with a variety of tools for potential use in facilitating ongoing asynchronous discussions among my students.  (Thanks, readers, who took the time to share ideas for discussion tools on my last post.)

I have access to Blackboard, so could easily just use its discussion board feature, but I’m not crazy about the product for a variety of philosophical, androgogical, and aesthetic reasons I won’t go into here.

I and a colleague also played around with Twitter for a class project last year. There were certainly plusses, the greatest being that students and instructors could easily engage with it from mobile devices.  Also, since a good portion of the class was already using Twitter, they were much more likely to see and respond to comments and questions from other students on an ongoing basis.  Thus, conversations had more energy and were less difficult to sustain than discussions in a “destination” web forum that students had to go out of their way to access.  

However, students sometimes found the 140 character limit, well… limiting.  Also, it was often difficult to follow the train of discussion, especially when conversations would “fork,” or when Student A would tweet several times in an afternoon and then Student B went online at night and wanted to respond to something other than Student A’s most recent tweet.

Why Not Tumblr?

Then it occurred to me that Tumblr, which I (obviously) use and generally like, might actually be a viable tool for asynchronous learning that solves the issues with other tools discussed above.  

Here’s why:

Be Yourself or Be Anonymous

I expect that most, if not all, of my students will be comfortable with and excited about the idea of “learning in the open.”  

However, it’s possible that a few might not be, and I want to respect students’ choices about privacy.  On Tumblr, people can (publicly) share as much or as little personal information as they’d liked.  Students who want to be publicly associated with the content they create and share can do so.  Others could start Tumblr blogs writing under pseudonyms.  Their writing and media would still be on the Web, but it wouldn’t be tied to their names, and they would be the “owners” of it, able to edit and delete whenever they desired to do so.  

However, with regard to access control, Tumblr isn’t as flexible as some other platforms in terms of allowing bloggers to determine specifically who can and cannot access what they post.  (You can prevent others from knowing who you are and from commenting on your posts, but you can’t prevent others from reading your stuff.)  If a students wants more privacy that simple anonymity, I’ll probably point them toward Wordpress or Blogger.  (For this limitation alone, I would probably steer K-12 teachers away from Tumblr as a tool for individual student blogs unless they get consent from students’ parents first.)

Choice in Access

Tumblr has an open API which has facilitated the creation of numerous third-party applications for posting and reading Tumblr content on a wide variety platforms.

This has helped make Tumblr extremely mobile-friendly.  Of course it’s accessible through a web browser, but there are also free apps available for all the major smartphone platforms including iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, and Symbian, so students can follow and contribute to conversations wherever they might be.  (Students with non-smart phones can still submit posts by e-mail and even create audio posts simply by dialing a free dedicated phone number.)

Additionally, with it’s own “follow” feature, students can subscribe to each others’ content staying within Tumblr if they like.  However, since Tumblr blogs also generate RSS feeds, students have a lot of other options, and can easily add course content to “personal learning environments” they manage for themselves using tools like iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.  Tumblr also provides built-in options for sharing to Facebook and Twitter.

Staying in the Flow

The advantage of Tumblr over Twitter alone is that it you can get a “flow” of information (like Twitter) for the course overall, but students can react and respond to specific posts in a variety of ways, and not just to a specific person as with Twitter @replies.  

For example, students have the option of “reblogging” a post and adding their own ideas and comments while maintaining a thread.  Or, students can enable “answers” to posts for others to leave comments.  (One criticism I have of this feature on Tumblr is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to “answer” your own posts, making the tool pretty much useless as a tool for a blogger to converse with his or her readers.)  A better option, in my view, is for students and instructors to enable Disqus in their Tumblr blog templates, automatically adding a full-featured threaded discussion tool to each post.  (I like this idea better than using the threaded discussion tool in Blackboard, primarily because students get to moderate the discussion on their blogs and I don’t have to referree.)

Finally, with support for tags in posts, students can easily associate their posts with particular topics.  This is helpful both to other students and should be helpful to them in the future in finding and re-using ideas and materials from blog posts and class conversations in more formal projects.  

Also, if students tag course-related posts with the course number, other students could use the search tool in the Tumblr dashboard to find content related to the class.  They can also use the “tracked tags” tools to monitor the class overall, and know when there are unread  posts without having to manually skim through a Tumblr feed.  (Of course, most RSS readers can also be used to identify new material for students who follow content using RSS instead of the Tumblr dashboard, so again students would have options.)

Conclusions

All my students will be required to create blogs that are at least available to myself and their fellow students.  I’ll be suggesting they explore Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, and Posterous before deciding which platform to use.  I’ll make a mental note to update this post in a few weeks reporting back on their choices and reasons for their picks.

In the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing creative ideas from other Tumblr users about using the platform in teaching and learning, as well as “if I knew then what I know now” experiences from others who have used any blogging platform in courses with online students.

Thoughts?