Does one need a reason to blog?
Blogging has caught the imagination of many and there are numerous notable blogs on the web as well as many thousands that are too personal to be of much interest to the majority.
This blog will be used to record and monitor the use of the blog as an eLearning tool in the design studio. During this academic year 2005-06, 38 students from the Landscape Architecture and Garden Design pathways at the University of Greenwich will be asked to keep a blog as a record of their design work through their final year of degree studies.
The aim is to improve the self-reflective aspect of their design work, to encourage peer review within the student group and to aid tutors in keeping in touch with student project work. In addition, the blog will give students a venue where all their ideas, sketches, photos and thoughts can be collated. The hope is that this will create a coherent narrative of their design process. It also gives them the opportunity to show friends and family what they are doing during their studies.
This is not an entirely new idea. A number of design based programmes have begun to use this technique and in most cases have been very successful. I began to consider the use of blogs for design studio teaching about 12 months ago. Recently, I attended the "Designs on eLearning" conference (14-16 September 2005) at the University of the Arts in London. During the conference, the use of blogs was described in no fewer than 4 papers. Each took a slightly different approach but all were very positive.
So, now it's my turn and this blog will be used to document what is likely to be an interesting experiment during the course of this academic year. In addition, it didn't seem reasonable to require students to keep a blog unless I was prepared to do the same myself.
This blog will be used to record and monitor the use of the blog as an eLearning tool in the design studio. During this academic year 2005-06, 38 students from the Landscape Architecture and Garden Design pathways at the University of Greenwich will be asked to keep a blog as a record of their design work through their final year of degree studies.
The aim is to improve the self-reflective aspect of their design work, to encourage peer review within the student group and to aid tutors in keeping in touch with student project work. In addition, the blog will give students a venue where all their ideas, sketches, photos and thoughts can be collated. The hope is that this will create a coherent narrative of their design process. It also gives them the opportunity to show friends and family what they are doing during their studies.
This is not an entirely new idea. A number of design based programmes have begun to use this technique and in most cases have been very successful. I began to consider the use of blogs for design studio teaching about 12 months ago. Recently, I attended the "Designs on eLearning" conference (14-16 September 2005) at the University of the Arts in London. During the conference, the use of blogs was described in no fewer than 4 papers. Each took a slightly different approach but all were very positive.
So, now it's my turn and this blog will be used to document what is likely to be an interesting experiment during the course of this academic year. In addition, it didn't seem reasonable to require students to keep a blog unless I was prepared to do the same myself.