EnquiryBlogger

Social Learning Journal

EnquiryBlogger extends WordPress, the world's most popular open source content management system and blogging platform, with a set of plugins that turn it into a particular flavour of social learning journal.

It is an example of Dispositional Learning Analytics (also referred to by Schneider, et al. 2012 as Learning Process Analytics). EnquiryBlogger is a collaboration between the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (Simon Buckingham Shum & Rebecca Ferguson), and University of Bristol's Centre for Systems Learning & Leadership (Ruth Deakin Crick).

For Learners (e.g. school and university students, workplace staff) EnquiryBlogger adds three learner plugins to a WordPress blog, giving visual feedback on how many times blog posts have been categorised by a learner using the seven dimensions of "Learning Power"[1], progress against the core activities of Authentic Enquiry[2], and a visual "mood graph" showing the peaks and troughs of how the learner feels about their work. The plugins are also used to navigate quickly to those posts, by clicking on the coloured blobs.

For Teachers/Mentors there are three dashboard widgets displaying all learners' plugins in their group, and an additional EnquiryBlogBuilder plugin for batch generating blogs for a whole cohort. The cohort can quickly visit each others' blogs for commenting through auto-generated links in their blogs.

Partners

• University of Bristol's Centre for Systems Learning & Leadership