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 significanr 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, a model that Salmon introduced in
her previous book (E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online).
The model distinguishes between five stages of online learning, in which
specific attention is paid to the moderator’s role.
- Stage 1 - Access & Motivation. The main focus of this stage is on exploring
the technology and access to it. Winning the learner’s trust is the
main goal. Time is also spent on motivating participants; e-tivities are
organised around this.
- Stage 2 - Socialisation. Building on the first stage, this stage focuses
on social processes and ‘community building’.
- Stage 3 - Information Exchange. This stage revolves around exchanging
information and performing tasks. Interaction takes place at two levels,
namely with the course content and with other participants and the moderator.
- Stage 4 - Knowledge Construction. Knowledge development is central to
this stage. Discussion activities and group dynamics play a major role
too.
- Stage 5 - Development. This stage is characterised by reflection and
group learning.