Blogging with students: How and Why

Short but useful overview of blogging by Lindsay Jordan (full post here).

Blogs are essentially online diaries and as such are very powerful tools for reflection. Lindsay points out that if you intend to use blogs for reflection then the subject needs be of 'value' in terms of offering the students discrepancies, uncertainties and dissatisfactions, i.e. the subject needs to be something that the students can explore.

Valuable advice on assessing students' reflective blogs is also given. Rather than assess the content of the blog you should focus on their level of reflective thinking in terms of critical analysis (presentation of arguements, evidence, etc.).

Blog as Eportfolio

Can blogs be used as an eportfolio? Because my blog is part reflection and part dissemination I have never needed the use of an eportfolio. I can see the benefits of eportfolios but for the time being blogging suits me just fine.

Anyway way this post from Jeff Utecht (Web Link) got me to consider as to how you might encourage students to use blogs as eportfolios.

in Jeff's own words "It’s an easy concept once you understand how blogs work. Create a category for each subject…students collect digital documents via, mp3, images, uploads, etc. throughout the year reflecting on there learning. When it comes time for the Student-Led Conferences (SLC) students can go back through their year’s reflections pick the ones they want to share with their parents and simple add it to the Student-Led Conference Category.".

So you could ask students to collect particular pieces of evidence and store them under an agreed tag.

I like this idea as once again it shows the power of tagging and categorising posts. These elements provide a great deal of flexibility in terms of the context and purpose of the blog.

Jeff reflects on the long term benefit of doing this "Thinking long turn this blog continues to grow each year. Daniel continues to add his thinking, his reflections, his documentation of learning. As his content grows he’s able to not only reflect on what he’s learning now, but go back in history on his own blog and link to that prior knowledge and thinking from years past.".

Interestingly he also touches on the issue as to whether reflection should occur in private or in public space, citing the latter as being a more powerful learning experience. There are plenty of arguments against this - some students are not comfortable with sharing their views. However I do know that the possibility that this post might be read does make me put more effort into outlining arguments and so as a result is a more more powerful learning opportunity.

Blogs in education part 2

Okay. Onwards in my quest to find examples of using blogs for learning and teaching. I’m particularly after straight forward examples of their use for which I can then summarise and pass on to those of you who are interested.

Stuart Glogoff’s article ‘Instructional Blogging: Promoting Interactivity, Student-Centered Learning, and Peer Input’ (Web Link, as mentioned in an earlier post provides a range of examples. In particular he uses blogs to encourage guided discovery and knowledge construction. In one of his modules, for example, he asks students to do additional reading on specific topics while referring back to the course materials. After this exploration, the students synthesized their views through blogging in which they presented what they had learned as applied to real-world situations. Commenting by other students was actively encouraged since, as Stuart recognizes, this encourages collaboration - the students are working together to build knowledge. As Stuart observes, they are engaging in cognitive scaffolding through which they revisit the learning space, build upon prior knowledge, think about what they have learned, and drill deeper for more information.

Often individual student blogs are usually the main focus of these articles. However it’s worth realizing the power of the class blog when used in association with personal blogs. Class blogs can be used to post summaries, (BTW class blogs are available on the module website within StudyNet). For instance students could be required to summarise their entries on their personal blog into one blog entry for the class blog. Or as Stuart notes the class blog can be used to supplement the blogging exercise in which the tutor provides additional information such as summaries of important classroom discussions, reinforce the sessions key learning’s, and clarify points that students had struggled to understand. In either case you should take care to make full use of the tagging facilities when using the class blog as this helps to add some order to the entries made there. For example you could categorize particular entries left by yourself (‘assignment’, ‘’new topic’ etc.) or encourage the students to add tags relating to the subject of their entries.

Finally blogs in themselves may only be part of a bigger picture. Christian Dalsgaard’s article, ‘Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems’ (Web Link), describes as to how he uses blogs to direct students towards problem solving. In this context the blogs are tools with which the student can use to solve problems on their own and in collaboration with others students. He further stresses that, and this is something I often talk about, blogs should not be used on their own. Any activity which by it’s nature is problem-based and requires collaborative effort needs tools which support construction, presentation, reflection, collaboration. So we’re talking about personal blogs being used in association with forums, wikis, class blogs etc. He even goes so far as to identify the need for tools for finding people and other resources of relevance to their problem – basically social networking elements which again is an issue close to my heart and the subject of an earlier blog entry relating to the future evolution of socially based MLEs. And the result? We have ‘An open-ended learning environment provides students with multiple possibilities for activities.’

Assessing blogs

How do we assess blogs in teaching? In the past I have tended to focus on the benefits blogging can bring to education. And this is an area I will continue to focus on. However for the next few weeks I’m going to look at assessing student blogging as an academic exercise. I’m not saying that the experience should be led by the method of assessment but what I intend to do here is explore as to how other practitioners have assessed student blogs and in doing so provide some tips. At the same time I hope to outline examples of how some of blogs have been used.

First off some useful ideas on how to get things going provided by David Warlick, (blog). They focus on getting tboth author and reader to ask themselves a series of questions. I’ve altered these slightly to put a tutor: student context to them.
When writing a blog, the student should ask:

1. What did I read in order to write this blog? What do I know and where did that knowledge come from?
2. What are all points of view on the issue?
3. What do you wish the readers to know, understand, believe, or do?
4. What will not be said? What are some of the remaining questions about the issue? (I like this one).

From the tutor perspective (or if you the student if you are using peer assessment) when reading a blog, ask yourself:

1. What did the student read in order to write this blog? What did they already know and where did that knowledge come from?
2. What are the other points of view? What are the other sides of the story?
3. What did the student want readers to know, understand, believe, or do?
4. What was left unsaid? What are the remaining questions and issues?
The next post will look at some practicalities.

Blurring the distinction between blogging and wikiing

Picked this up via Josie Fraser’s twitter.

Nice presentation on the relative merits of using blogs and wikis. I wish I was there to here the presentation. It seems to echoes may thoughts as to how blogs (particularly class blogs) and wikis can overlap. On the one extreme blogs are very powerful for inculcating autonomy and independent learning while the wiki works at the other extreme through requiring people to interact, engage, compete and criticise. The overlap can occur where in both instances learner’s exchange ideas leading to further generation of knowledge - exchange naturally occurs through negotiation on the wiki while from the blogging side this occurs through commenting.

Enjoy - particularly slides 5 - 8

Pelc 2009 Mashups

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