I have been thinking more about how to use blogging with students
and I am rereading Stuart
Glogoff’s article “Instructional Blogging:
Promoting Interactivity, Student-Centered Learning, and Peer Input” which
is on the innovate web site.
[I can log in with my work email address and my usual forum password.
Registration is free so anybody can join to see the full articles.]
Having tried out using blogs in my Autumn 2005 semester module I have found that there are some issues I need to address.
- I set up four student blogs and divided the students into four
groups so that each group could have a blog. They were asked to use
the blog to address, as a group, a specific question about web design.
After some initial activity which I encouraged by giving some time
in face to face sessions things started to slow down considerably.
A few students did contribute and one or two actually created their
own blog and requested to be joined to the group blogs under their
own name. These were more generally the more confident students.
I suggest that there might be a number of reasons why these group blogs did not work:
- As it was a group blog no single student felt responsible for the blog and therefore they did not feel motivated to post to it. I had thought that having a group blog would help with motivation as they would not expose themselves as individuals on the blog and it would therefore be psychologically easier to post. However they did not get together to reach a concensus and then post as I had hoped they would. To ensure that this happens perhaps I would need to set structured activities from which the group reached conclusions and then posted them.
- As a consequence of not posting to the blog they did not build up confidence in using a blog. I had found in the past that students need to build up their confidence with using online interaction if they were to do it successfully.
- A blog is the wrong software environment for promoting collaborative work and what was needed was a wiki where the students could work together to produce a data resource.
- I set up a module blog which I used for some discussion of the
course as a whole, for discussions of particular topics on the course
and for feedback about what the students were doing. I allowed them
to post to the blog, using it as a group blog, but I also posted
on the blog and asked them to comment on the post. With multiple
users posting the blog quickly became overwhelming whereas the procedure
of students commenting on my posts worked better. Even so there were
not as many comments as I had hoped for.
Clearly this was in part an attempt at a group blog and it did not work.
What to do next?
The first thing I did was to read through other peoples advice on what
not to do with blogs. James Farmer is quite clear that group
blogs are not a good idea. I am not sure that I would have appreciated
this if I had read it before my experiences but I do “get it” now.
Stuart Glogoff’s article also provided some useful ideas.
As a consequence of my experience and my reading [need to reference more material] I have decided on the following procedure for a Master’s Level Course I am teaching next semester.
- Each student will have their own blog, created on Blogger. They will be shown how to set up an email facility on the blog so that they receive copies of each of the blogs, a procedure designed to alleviate any anxiety about “losing their material”. Student’s will be asked to make a regular post to their blog, possibly a minimum of one post a week. [ Be careful about too much prescription] This post can be anything relevant to their learning e.g. reflections on the course or their learning, an evaluation of some data which they think might be useful to the group. There will also be tasks that they will be asked to do which will involve posting material on their blog as part of the activity. This will be linked into assessment [see later]
- I will also set up my own module blog on which I will reflect on the module learning and ask for feedback about the module.
- Each student, and myself, will be joined to Bloglines so that we can all see an aggregation of one another’s blogs.
- We will also have a module wiki which will be used to produce collaborative work from the student group. There will be specific tasks to be done which will involve producing a resource, or series of resources, related to web design. This will be supplemented by a presentaion area where students can put examples of their own work if the wiki does not provide sufficient control over formatting. It is relatively easy for them to link from a wiki or a blog to these materials.
Will it work?
Clearly the students will need some incentive to make this work. The
best type of motivation is intrinsic motivation and hopefully students
at this level will be motivated to learn anyway but they will certainly
need guidance and encouragement.
Motivation will be provided by:
- Feedback from myself and other students on their blogs. We will need to agree a policy about feedback as their is evidence that lack of feedback is a demotivator for on-line discussions.
- After a full discussion of the learning outcomes of the module and a joint production of the assessement criteria students will be asked to use these criteria to claim a grade for the module by writing a 3000word reflective commentary to justify the grade they are claiming. This must be backed up by significant evidence from theit blogs, the wiki and their comments on the blogs of others. Throughout the module they will be building the evidence for this claim by using the blog and wiki and hopefully this should provide a significant extrinsic motivation.
Additionally I will need to ensure that they have the appropriate tools to join in these module activities with a significant chance of success. I am certainly expecting them to reach a fairly high level of online activity and they will need to go through the earlier stages of on-line development [the five stage model see below ] as discussed by Gilly Salmon in her two books about working on-line. We will need some initial cognitively simple and psychologically non-demanding activities to allow them to build an online presence and the confidence to work online.
The five stage model [pop-up] , a model that Salmon introduced in her previous book (E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online).