RAMBLE on

I'm an advocate for the use of blogs as reflective journals. The accessibility of blogs, the immediacy syndication affords, and the collaborative reflective possibilities (e.g. critical friends) networking allows, all make for a powerful environment for reflective practice. Thus RAMBLE, a JISC funded research project intrigues me. (Great acronym too!) To quote from the abstract:

RAMBLE will investigate the use of Web logs (blogs) as a reflective authoring activity in an educational context. The project will be particularly relevant to Higher or Further Education, and these will be the targets for the dissemination of the project's conclusions.

The project's work is divided into two strands:

1. The off-line authoring of Web log entries on a PDA and subsequent upload to a Web log server.
2. The creation of a blogging component that will allow Web log content to be integrated into Bodington, an open source VLE.

The first strand will investigate mobile blogging for students who do not have immediate access to an Internet connection. We will investigate various PDA-based blogging clients, and use them in three case studies of learners at different stages in their learning—in the fields of Medicine, Chemistry and ICT (this project).

The second strand will develop a tool that will enable blog content to be presented in the wider educational context of a VLE. The tool will be able to query any blog server that is standards-based.

Note that the project does not propose to deliver VLE content to the PDA. The use of VLEs directly with mobile devices involves considerable complexity and is outside the scope of this project.

The proposal provides some interesting links, including one to Pebble, an open source, Java-based blog server which compares well with others and which includes desktop and moblog clients.

A-keep-a ramblin' baby…