1. Blogs in the classroom: Utilizing CommentPress for a case-study course Joon Soo Lim, The School of Journalism

2. My teaching in case study  Case study in public relations: online public relations.  One of the challenges  the lack of standard textbook  too many industry jargons  rapidly changing communication technologies, and finally,  Surprisingly, today’s college students are NOT tech-savvy.  Use of a Blog for educational tool  to facilitate inside and out of the classroom discussion  to improve students digital literacy

3. Blogs in the Classroom  the use of blogs in education is on the rise  educational blogging business: Edublog (blogging for teachers and students)Edublog Free without any advertising, come with 100MB of free upload space Powered by WordPress  Uses (Richardson, 2009)  Post and upload class materials & information  Provide cases and examples with multimedia clips  Provide links to external Web resources  Invite students comments or feedback

4. Advantages of using blogs in classroom  A useful pedagogical device  Flexibility and the ability to recontextualize information (Williams & Jacobs, 2004)  Save time and costs (Quible, 2005)  Blog-based conversation as a powerful tool for learning (Instone, 2005; Glogoff, 2005)  Promote deep learning (Instone, 2005)

5. Some issues in adopting blogs in education  Reverse Chronological ordering  All comments are displayed linearly at the bottom of the page  Even the discussion in the form of comments and trackbacks are not threaded

6. Overcoming the limitations using CommentPress  What is CommentPress  “an open source theme for the WordPress that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text column Digital version of Marginalia  developed by the Institute for the Future of the Bookthe Institute for the Future of the Book  Philosophy  “Text is meant to be a conversation.”

7. Overcoming the limitations using CommentPress Typical BlogsBlogs powerd by CommentPress Reverse Chronological orderingChronological ordering All comments accumulated linearly at the bottom of the page Comments can be attached at the paragraph as well as at the whole-text level. Discussion will not be displayed in a threaded or nested format The comments are in a thread-style dialogue with one another,

8. Screenshot: Chronological ordering of posts

9. Screenshot: Threaded comment

10. Innovation in the blog-based discussion  Innovation in discussion  Marginalia is not new in the history of book Marginalia

11. What’s new, then?  allows multiple readers to engage with a text simultaneously, and to engage with one another across time and distance  made it possible to have the comment area move in the right hand column as you scrolled down the page, changing its contents depending on which paragraph in the left hand column you selected.  helps “capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin note” for class blogs”

12. Advantages  Make comments in the margin  Next to the paragraph of the text to which the comment pertains  promotes dialogue within and around the text Within: comment on the page as a whole Around: comment on each paragraph.  add “threadedness” to the discussion,  commenters can reply to each other

13. Advantages of using CommentPress Table of Contents – Discussion topics will be viewable in a chronological order.

14. How to install CommentPress  Install WordPress, then upload CommentPress onto the WP-Content > Themes  Then, activate the CommentPress from WP-admin > Design tab  Sign up for the Edublogs serviceEdublogs  Then, go to presentation from the dashboard, and choose CommentPress as your theme.

15. Testimonials “Elevated the level of class discussion about those poems.” [CommentPress in My Classroom], The author of [The USA English Forum Blog]CommentPress in My ClassroomThe USA English Forum Blog

16. Testimonials (cont’d)  “Providing so many points of entry really gives the possibility of a much more rich and nuanced conversation” [University Publishing in a digital age, by Ithaka, a NPO.]University Publishing in a digital age

17. CommentPress in Education: Some examples (cont’d)  Literary-criticism courses  Critiques of Poems Critiques of Poems  The Divine Comedy: Inferno The Divine Comedy: Inferno

18. CommentPress in Education: Some examples (cont’d)  Textbook writing  Publish chapters of one’s upcoming book  Jonathan Zittrain, The future of the Internet and how to stop it. Yale University Press (CCL)The future of the Internet and how to stop it

19. CommentPress in Education: gamer theory (cont’d) gamer theory

20. CommentPress for a case-study course: Case studies in PR: online public relations Case studies in PR: online public relations Organize class lessons in a chronological context Provide cases and examples with multimedia clips Questions or feedback directly on the chunks of text. Have students put comments on text or, have students respond to each other’s case analysis from their own blogs [i.e., Trackbacks]

21. Suggestions: Possible Use  Speech analysis: Responding to different segments of speechdifferent segments

22. References  Glogoff, S. (2005). Instructional blogging: Promoting interactivity, student-centered learning, and peer input. Innovate 1 (5). Retrieved July 18 from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=126  Instone, L. (2005). Conversations beyond the classroom: Blogging in a professional development course. Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education 2005. Retrieved July 2, 2008, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/34_Instone.pdf. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/34_Instone.pdf  Johnson, A. (2004). Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs. The Internet TESL Journal, 10(8). Retrieved July 15, from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Johnson-Blogs/http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Johnson-Blogs/  Read, B. (2007, September 28). Marginally better: Software uses side notes to turn books into discussions. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol 54, issue 5, p. A23.Marginally better: Software uses side notes to turn books into discussions  Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms (2 nd Ed).Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.  Quible, Z. K. (2005). Blogs and written business communication courses: a perfect union. Journal of Education for Business, 80(6), 327-333.  Williams, J. B., & Jacobs, J. (2004). Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(2), 232-247. 