In addition to using Canvas discussion forums and VoiceThread for communication, blogging is another great way to promote community in your course. A blog is a website where learners can make posts in different forms, such as articles, opinions, or journal entries. Similar to our discussion forums in Canvas, blog readers can also respond to main posts. A blog can be used for weekly communication, or for assignments and projects. You can also use course blogs to introduce students to the public scholarship genre of writing and what it means to publish in the public domain.
At Emory, we have our own supported website creation tool using WordPress called ScholarBlogs. ScholarBlogs is available for those who intend to use the technology for teaching and research. It offers a platform for public and private blogs and web pages capable of displaying text, images and video. To learn more about ScholarBlogs, watch the short video in our Canvas course where I interview Anandi Knuppel, a Training Specialist in the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. She is also available for consultations and questions about the ScholarBlogs tool, at alsalin [at] emory [dot] edu.
In this module, we learned about the Community of Inquiry Framework model. By addressing three different levels of presence (cognitive, teaching, and social), we can create more meaningful learning experiences for our students. For your blog post, select one activity in your own course (current or in development) for each type of presence and briefly describe those three activities. Be sure to label which activity supports which type of presence and give an explanation for why this activity supports that type of presence. Finally, post responses to at least two of your colleagues.