Suggestions: using blogs in a KM class

I am going into my third round of teaching a knowledge management class in Northwestern's Masters of Learning and Organizational Change program.  The course is focused on knowledge management from a tactical perspective: an introduction to tools and techniques that address aspects of knowledge management.  Obviously, I can't cover everything in ten weeks.  I try to provide enough background that the students understand what is out there, and when it makes sense to explore a given technique.

I've talked about blogs before, but I think one of the struggles with talking about blogs is that you don't get a good feel for what they are or how they are related to knowledge management.  So, I am going to have the students set up and run personal blogs over the quarter.  I'll have them react to other class readings and build up to reading and commenting and writing about one another's blogs as well.  There will be several points through the quarter where we highlight aspects of the blogging: reading, comments, trackbacks, community. 

I'm looking for suggestions and guidance on this topic: what works well, where do I need to tread carefully.  This class is not a technology class, and the students are not required to have any programming skilz, so I am looking for guidance on using blogs in an educational setting with Knowledge Management as the context.

The university has a blogging platform set up (WordPress, I believe), so that question should be handled. 

I've got a few thus far, but I'd like to make sure I cover my bases.  A former student (and blogger) pointed me to Dennis Jerz and Will Richardson.  And I am planning to talk to Jim McGee, who introduced blogs in a class at Kellogg several years ago.  I believe Liz Lawley's used blogs in her classroom as well (pinged).

6 Comment(s)

James Dellow said:

I always think Anne Bartlett-Bragg's Blogging to Learn article with its 5 step blogging model on p.6 is a great place to start a conversation about the value of blogging to KM:

http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au/edition04/pdf/Blogging_to_Learn.pdf

I know that Timothy Johnson has his students create personal blogs in the classes he teaches at Drake, evidenced by his post here. I met Timothy when he did a speaking engagement for my PMI Chapter, and I'm sure he will have a wealth of insight to add to this discussion.

Josh Nankivel
http://www.PMStudent.com


Aaron said:

Hey Jack, interesting idea.

Just FYI, MSLOC.net has a blog aggregation feature built in to it. We hid it when we launched the site but if it helps you track the blogs of your students all in one place (it supports a date sorted 'recent entries' list) we could turn that on for you and your students.

Just drop me a note if that would be helpful.

Dave Simmons said:

Hi, Jack,

One of the important things of any profession is for the person to keep up on the "sexy topics" of the day. How about having the students blog their responses among themselves regarding recent topics in the KM blogsphere?

I'm sure your recommended bloglist is much longer than mine, but Gurteen, Snowden, Davenport, and Suarez all come to mind. Such an internal discussion would get them acquainted with the KM topics of the day, force them to structure an opinion about them, construct arguments for those opinions, and use blogs to keep up with what's going down in the KM community.

Dave

» Using Blog in a KM class? from Romeo Pruno

PuÃ² essere un'idea ma puÃ² essere anche un modo per far passare la voglia, prima di incominciare agli Read More

jackvinson Author Profile Page said:

Here is another option I just came across. Have a KM class use a wiki to write a book on KM: http://lorne.sisatspace.com/2006/08/31/group-writing-a-textbook/

Leave a comment


Previous entry: Blogs are knowledge management tools

Next entry: Learn how to be curious

About this Entry

This entry was published on February 12, 2007 12:40 AM and has 6 comment(s).

Related Entries

Find recent content on the main index, explore the full tag cloud, or look in the archives to find all content.

Syndication Options

Subscribe to Entry

Powered by MT-Notifier

Powered by Movable Type 4.35-en
Picture a steaming coffee cup. Better yet, grab one and have a read!

KJolt Memberships

Follow jackvinson on Twitter

View Jack Vinson's profile on LinkedIn
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2007/02/12/suggestions_using_blogs_in_a_km_class.html
blog.jackvinson.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
23647
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JCSMTKPTPXALWAXRUFNZZFC7WUMDV4LC
<urn:uuid:4931002a-aea0-4d01-b55b-553eeee1e733>
2014-03-08T01:46:07Z
208.67.207.151
sha1:JDYAUYJ6QGMMFNDNEL5HAH7EKNWMRKQC
<urn:uuid:4d1b4400-274d-40c1-9568-60f3d3854e02>
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2007/02/12/suggestions_using_blogs_in_a_km_class.html
response
<urn:uuid:0dff4b4a-2523-4f6a-a4d4-a9ac92bf29f8>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf