http://posterous.com

The basics

Posterous is a blogging engine that allows users to set up blogs quickly and easily, though also giving you very good control over the look and feel of the blog should you wish to exercise it. Remember: a blog can also be a website…! Posterous has recently introduced a new approach which gives you options of either going public, one-to-many “blogging your great ideas with the world… highly-customizable Posterous Sites are the simple way to send your message where you need it” or using a group approach: “Posterous Groups are great for sharing privately via email, mobile, or the web. Discuss, collaborate, or just keep everyone on the same page”.

Signup is relatively simple; there is excellent control and customisation; the interface can take some getting used to, but the focus on email, mobile texting and other ways of contributing content is brilliant. The main goal of posterous is to automate and manage more tedious aspects of web publishing to allow people to focus on content and collaboration.

Detailed discussion

Posterous has redesigned its opening page and increased a focus on groups since these presentations but the service remains largely the same

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Posterous:

Video

Discussion and live demonstration of slides:

What is great

Summing it all up: Posterous is great because the technology is engaging, simple and yet powerful. It feels like you are in different kind of web environment, much more amenable to manipulation and collaboration – a really good example of the read/write web. Posterous doesn’t make students learn: but if you want to focus on student activity, online interaction around ideas – either alone or supporting on-campus classes – then posterous is a must.

Here is an example of how I used Posterous to create the materials for a workshop, what I wryly called a ‘blogshop’, that was then conducted together in a computer lab, moving between face to face interaction and online tasks: 5 steps towards new-fashioned online learning

Scenarios for using this tool

Distributed discussion in response to presented material

A unit controller in a large art history unit pre-organises posts, scheduled to be sent a particular times to a private blog of which all students are members. The posts contain a specific question concerning a movement or genre of artistic expression along with three links to relevant online readings and resources, as well as images which best typify the artistic movement. Students in the unit are all invited to be members of the blog with specific instructions about how to use it – they are to reply only by commenting on each item, or as comments in response to other comments. At the end of each specified period, the unit controller posts another live item which sums up the discussion.

Posterous:

• enables posts to be organised in advance, at a single sitting, for later timed release;
• allows teacher to control student contributions – only comments, or comments and posts, or just reading; and
• allows for amendation of presented material later – enabling a more temporally distributed approach to teaching.

Located visual learning

100 engineering students study building materials science are required to undertake investigations around the city in which they live for the kinds of materials used in various buildings. They must take photographs of these buildings, post them to a collective Posterous blog with appropriate commentary. Each time a post is made, the teachers provide a comment in response and initiative discussion by asking a particular question which is then to be answered by other students. This takes place in the early part of the semester, The students are formed into smaller classes for other aspects of their study (labs of 10-12 students). Each lab group then reviews the entire Posterous site looking for particularly interesting examples of building materials and aggregates the content (using the Posterous URL for each entry) into a web presentation which provides more detail of the differences between the various materials.

Posterous:

• is designed for blogging ‘on the go’;
• can be student-centred, with the teacher responding to student input; and
• collects information at different times, from different individuals for later review.

Shared individual blogs

25 students studying cataloguing and metadata in a library science unit are each required to create a blog which tracks their work across a 6-week intensive work program to analyse and classify materials for online cataloguing. Each of the students is working on a different body of material and so are not competing directly with each other in completion of the task. Individual students each create a blog for their work which is kept private except for other students in the unit. All students are encouraged to post regularly to their blog about the problems and solutions they are encountering as the do the work. Since some students are on campus and others are not, this process creates a connection between all of the students in a period when formal classroom attendance is suspended to enable the focus on the large classification project. Each blog’s RSS feed is then taken into a single site by the unit controller who monitors all of the problems and issues collectively and provides responses for the unit as a whole, while also observing the interaction between students as they comment on each other’s problems. While the classification project is assessed individually, the blog is used by each student to also submit a reflective analysis of the process and its challenges, emphasising both what they learned from others and also how they helped others. This reflective analysis is a single document which quotes the relevant discussions / posts from the blog as examples.

Posterous:

• allows interaction between distance and on-campus students;
• enables an RSS feed from all the blogs to be aggregated; and
• serves as the basis for journalling, supporting reflection upon completion of overall task.

Alternatives

There are no immediate similar alternatives to posterous, which has largely claimed the main share of the opportunity to create blogs in a way that is both rapid and simple than services such as wordpress. Tumbler, http://tumblr.com, is one possibility but has largely morphed into a picture-gallery style of blogging. In reality, traditional or standard blogging sites (as discussed under standard tools, focusing on WordPress) are the best alternative to Posterous. There are also some website publishing applications which can also be used – though they lack the inherent flexibility and control of posterous.

Further discussion and concepts

An extensive guide (including videos and screencasts) has been provided by Concordia University:
http://teaching.concordia.ca/resources/teaching-with-new-technologies/blogging-as-a-learning-tool/

Churchill, D. 2009. Educational applications of Web 2.0: Using blogs to support teaching and learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40:1 (179–183).

Oravec, J. 2003. Blending by Blogging: weblogs in blended learning initiatives Journal of Educational Media, 28:2-3, (225-233).

Peña-López, I. 2007. The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 3:1.