Pedagogical Affordances and Instructional Design Using @withknown

I recieved a question from a teacher at Northwest Catholic High School. I am helping the school launch a 1:1 iPad initiative. As part of the workflow teachers can set up a classroom website using Known,an open source learning platform designed for educators.

We do not yet use a Known Campus licesened site yet. During the pilot year teachers are building their sites using Known Pro, which is an app you can install with Reclaim Hosting (The site license plans are so affordable I encourage districts and Universities to check them out). 

The teacher asked:

For my classes, I am not sure if putting all courses on one site will work in terms of the blogging. It seems as if blogging, adding posts etc is done through the general format and not through the static pages via the categories. So, would sophomore American lit students be posting on the same platform as senior Brit lit students? How to differentiate between blog postings among classes? Should teachers have one website per course for this reason? I might try it with just one class/course to see how it works out. 

There is a lot to unpack in the question. First is student blogging. The teacher is referring to using the learning network features of Known and creating a class stream where students can write status updates and long form posts.

I am all for student blogging. As a teacher you need to decide: Do I want students blogging? If the answer is no then build one Known site for all your classes. You control the content and the posts.  You can skip to the end of the post. I describe some possible desing decisions for this scenario below.

 

If you do want students blogging then there are a few things to consider:

• Do you want students posting straight to your Known site or sharing links to their own blogs.

I have tried both approaches when using Known and I like the latter. This was pretty much personal preference. Pedagogically speaking both worked well. I just believe shaping your space online is an important experience students need to have. Plus I think the stream looks prettier in snippets rather than in long form.

Just have students register for a free Known account and they can get started right away (other blogging platforms such as Tumblr or Blogger will work just as well). 

Setting up Known as a Class Stream

If you are going to use your Known, no matter how students blog as a learning network  then you do have to decide if you want all your classes on one site or one site for each class. Both options are available to teachers. There are trade-off and benefits to both.

• More streams to follow.  The more Known sites you have the more streams you have to follow. This can be handled with RSS feeds for every class but that is something else to learn.
• More pages to mantain. A hard Instructional Design lesson for teachers to learn is minimizing content. We want to put it all everywhere. The probelm is "everywhere" requires updating.
• Navigation would get messy . If you did have all your classes across all your grade levels posting to the same stream things could get messy. So a single site for all your classes is easier to mantain but messy to navigate. The more inferential navigation we require to students the less buy in we get. So here are a few work-arounds:
• Use hashtags. If you have a single stream for all classes you need to train your students to use hashtags in their posts. Tip: Hashtags in post titles will not work. They must be in the body of the post. Tip: Create a taxonomy of hashtags students with students.
• Pin Posts Known currently doesn't have a pinned post feature. Instead I would have one page in each category of important posts. If there are posts you want every student in that class to see just add a link.

 

 Setting up Known for Multiple Classes

 The first step in setting up a site for multiple classes is to close your computer. Go get a piece a paper and map out your navigation. You want to have common pathways across all your classes. This makes life easier on you and your user.

So don't read more until you know what pages you would want under each class and try hard to make them all the same.

Okay so you have returned after finishing your paper prototyping. Good. Lets build the site. Known uses a static pages organized into categories.

You first have to ensure you have tue static pages plug-in turned on. Go to Site Configuration and click on plug-ins

Then you have to install the static pages plug in. Just click in "Enable" if you see the word disabled (like me) then you already activated the pages

Next you add your categories. You should have one category for each of you classes. In Known categories become dropdown menus with page navigation

Then you add the pages to each class. Go back and find your paper prototype. Add the classes and assign each page to the correct category.

So my answer to the teacher is Yes. Yes, you can do all those things and no I will not tell you what I think is best. I told you what I prefer and the steps for both one single site and multiple classroom sites. In the end it comes down to decision points.

• First ask, how does this enhance my pedagogical goal?
• Then ask, does my workflow (navigation) make sense to users.
• Finally decide on how much time you have to invest in building and mantaining your class stream.

No matter if you are a 1:1 community or a one 2004 Windows XP desktop classroom mantaining a class website reaps long term efficiencies and efficacies with an initial investment of time and learning. In terms of students blogging well.... reading, writing, and participating on the web is how we encode and decode meaning onto the world.

Do you want to afford your students this possibility?