Do you want students to share their learning more visibly with their peers? Are you interested in creating assignments that allow students to collaborate, remix multimedia, and develop literacies for contributing to the open web? The VIUBlogs service can be used by faculty and students to communicate with peers and/or the community, write collectively, build a portfolio, or engage in reflective writing. An increasing number of faculty are developing learning designs which integrate VIUBlogs as part of student learning activities. In this session, we will showcase some of the possible ways which you might integrate VIUBlogs into your teaching practice and consider how doing so may make student learning more visible, collaborative, and authentic.

1. Portfolios, Blogs, and Websites: Using the VIUBlog
Platform for Student Assignments and Activities
Prepared by: Michael Paskevicius
Learning Technologies Application Developer
Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning
Vancouver Island University

2. Brainstorm
• What opportunities are we providing
students to develop their professional
online profiles ?
• What sites, networks, associations are
they commonly connected to?
• What evidence of student learning at
VIU currently exists online?
• What results come up when someone
Google’s your name?

3. ...advance the competences, knowledge, and skills needed to participate
successfully within the political, economic, social, and cultural realms of a more
open society (Geser, 2007; McAndrew, Scanlon, & Clow, 2010).
...fosters the development of valuable literacies for students entering the
workforce (Royle, Stager, & Traxler, 2014).
...extends web literacies to include the practices of open collaborative knowledge
formation, copyright, sharing, and open access to knowledge (Dohn, 2009).
Engaging students with open publishing, collaborative
/collective writing, and digital remixing projects…

4. Personal Portfolios, Blogs, and Websites
• A selection of online, reflective, integrative, and personal
documents that present how one has developed in their discipline
• Offers evidence of interests, accomplishments, and activities across
all aspects of academic life outlining growth
• Can be kept private, shared with faculty, shared with peers, or
made open to the world
• Extends the CV providing employers with a comprehensive portrait
of a student’s training, achievements, and future career goals
Bauer, G. (2011) Elements of A Professional Academic E-Portfolio. Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Delaware.
Available online: http://www2.udel.edu/e-portfolios/sites/udel.edu.e-portfolios/files/users/user19/epelements11j.pdf

5. Student Projects and Portfolios
http://studentblogs.viu.ca/erringtontkd/ http://studentblogs.viu.ca/knyvan/ https://studentblogs.viu.ca/moirabrowneportfolio/

6. Collective Writing Spaces
Image from Ng'ambi, D. (2010) Mobile Learning
in Africa: a case of anonymous SMS
http://www.slideshare.net/Ngambi1MLearning/
•Multi-author configurations for
collective and collaborative writing
projects
•Engage in peer review writing projects
•Document a projects’ evolution over
time
•Leave a legacy of student created work

7. Collective/Collaborative Writing Spaces
https://wordpress.viu.ca/informationdesign2016https://wordpress.viu.ca/cieviurecipes
http://wordpress.viu.ca/biol325

8. http://bit.ly/WordpressEDUCases

9. • 28% of websites on the internet are
powered by Wordpress
• Based on open-source technologies (PHP
and MYSQL)
• Active and vibrant developer community
• Highly portable, flexible, and adaptable
tool for creating websites
• Mobile friendly
New WordPress Buttons and Stickers | Nikolay Bachiyski | Creative Commons CC-BY

10. Mobile ready for
reading and
creating content
Write, upload,
edit, curate your
site on the go

11. http://studentblogs.viu.ca/http://wordpress.viu.ca/

12. Community support networks
at VIU
http://wordpress.viu.ca/ddcc/
http://wordpress.viu.ca/mbaenglish/
http://wordpress.viu.ca/viuasc/
• Multi-author sites created to
support VIU students and
communities

13. VIU Faculty of Education
Post Baccalaureate
Program
• All support for the program moved to open
access
• Building archive of capstone community action
projects into the site for future learners
• Students also develop professional practice
ePortolios over many years in the program
https://wordpress.viu.ca/pb6education/

14. Reflections from the
VIU Indigenous Learning
Circles
• Used to share summaries of
learning circle meetings,
participant reflections on
the experience, and
experiments with bringing
new perspectives into
pedagogical practice
https://wordpress.viu.ca/learningcircle

15. Biology 325
• All students built and maintained their own site
• Posts were aggregated into a parent site
• Tasked with creating two articles on a local bird species
of their choice
• Comments emerged as students reviewed one
another's work
http://wordpress.viu.ca/biol325

16. • Open access online journal for
undergraduate research in liberal
arts
• Edited and curated by students
• Agreed to Creative Commons
licensing for the journal in
principle
http://wordpress.viu.ca/compassrose/
The Compass Rose

17. https://wordpress.viu.ca/cieviurecipes/
• Students collected stories
of food and culture from
the community and shared
these in a collaborative
writing space
• An open online resource
which can evolve and grow
over time

18. https://wordpress.viu.ca/iceland2017
• Students and faculty
reflecting on field trip
experience to Iceland
• An open online rich media
resource which can be
accessed by family and
peers
• Comments and feedback on
student posts already
emerging

19. Opportunities for discussion, peer review, and
feedback

20. Privacy controls
• Allow search engines to index this site – accessible to the world
• Visible only to registered users of this network –available only to logged in
members of the VIU community
• Visible only to registered users of this site – available only to people
explicitly added to the site
• Visible only to administrators of this site – available only to people
explicitly added to the site as administrators

21. Explore Creative Commons Licensed Works
For more see:
http://creativecommons.ca/
https://ciel.viu.ca/learning-technologies-innovation/developing-using-media-content/finding-using-open-educational-resources/creative-commons-licences
http://www.slideshare.net/mpaskevi/introduction-to-open-educational-resources-2013
Freely and legally accessible resources for reuse and remixing in creative works

22. What challenges or benefits can you imagine engaging
students with open publishing, collaborative /collective
writing, and digital remixing projects?

23. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Prepared by: Michael Paskevicius
Learning Technologies Application Developer
Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning
michael.paskevicus@viu.ca
Follow me: http://twitter.com/mpaskevi
Blog: http://wordpress.viu.ca/ciel
Presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/mpaskevi