My new blog can be found at : http://drandrewoliver.blogspot.com/

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.’

His course assignments requires each student to:

* Post entries to their own personal blog (available in student)
* Read entries on their classmates blog and leave 3 substantive comments per week

Stuart points out that the comments help not only to ensure active participation but also provides feedback and validation of the initial student’s contribution from their peers. It’s worth noting that the student on realizing that their work will be up for public scrutiny may make an extra effort in terms of creativity and recognizing the contribution of others. The outcome of such an exercise is a positive learning community.

A good idea is to extend the exercise bringing in further collaboration. Personal blogging as outlined here is very good for independent learning and building confidence and ownership of the blogged content. What the tutor could now do is exploit these outcomes by having the student post to a communal class blog (also available in StudyNet on the module website) where everyone has equal rights in terms of adding content. So the class could be tasked with coming up with a final solution or argument using the class blog to explore the issues raised in their personal blogs.

Stuart demonstrates this by creating a class blog to act ‘as a common space for students to explore individual findings related to one of the course’s main themes’, in his case ‘recognizing and explaining real-world uses for new technologies’.

The students are required to:

* share new insights with each other
* read each other’s entries
* use the comments feature to add new content.

The key issue here is off course blending this into the course delivery. It wont happen by asking the students to go away and do these things. I know form experience that such activity needs an appropriate face to face element for the tutor to outline the task, Stuart outlines the process of knowledge construction for a blog entry for instance.

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.

What’s happening here is that Chris Harbeck is teaching maths through the medium of poetry. The students have been asked to create 5 poems describing integers. What’s interesting is that they have make their submissions via the blogging system through what are known as growing posts.

Basically a growing post is simply a single blog post whose content is repeatadly edited and modified until a final solution is reached. Now I really like the notion of the growing post – the fact that it can be used to produce student created content which is visible not only to the tutor but also to the rest of the class to comment on. I’ll be using this when I next run the Blended Learning in Higher Education module. Here I will require the students to create a growing post on a particular topic (probably relating to the Standards Framework) and ask them to leave comments on 3 other growing posts. When they revise their growing post I’ll ask them to post a comment summarising the changes they have made in the light of those comments left by others. Finally I’ll add my own comment.

Quote “To be told that you have to blog about your project will only bring about a 2 line post stating that some work has been done that week. To really get the juices flowing it needs to become more personal than that, there needs to be an incentive to show it’s important, perhaps a group discussion based around a different persons post each week with the group offering suggestions as to how to overcome a problem with the project – perhaps having everybody end their post with a query or question to that effect. Knowing that your peers will be reading and commenting upon what you have to say will most likely push you to be more informative than you might otherwise be.”

I think the suggestion of ending each post with a question is a good idea. And with this in mind would anyone care to comment?

A couple of interesting things to ponder:

comScore have reported that more than 14 million U.K. Internet users have visited a blog in August (Web Link) 2008 and that 27 million people watched more than 3 billion videos online in the UK in June 2008, (Web Link). YouTube accounts for approximately half of these figures which also includes the likes of the BBC. I think this is very interesting – we could be seeing a shift here in terms of viewing habits.

And another interesting one: 6.5 million Americans watched mobile Video in August 2008, (Web Link).

Great article via Campus Technology (Web Link)

Instead of the usual tips for using blogs in education the author presents a list of the most common mistakes. As one commentator states this can be extended to other uses of learning technology, particularly wikis.

1. Ineffective Contextualization
One of the more effective uses of blogging is for reflection. As such the student needs to be provided with concepts, topics to think through and to construct ideas from. So initial content needs to be covered beforehand and, if blogging is desired to be sustained over a period of time, new content needs to be introduced at regular intervals. Simply asking the students to blog wont work. As Reynard states the placing of the blog use must be based on the instructional flow.

2. Unclear Learning Outcomes
So once you ‘ve outlined the placing of the blog within the course it’s time to look at the learning outcomes achieved from their use.

Reynard outlines the potential benefits using categories from Bloom’s Taxonomy as the learning outcomes:

Analysis: relating to the construction of the blog post in which the students must gather together information (i.e. course content) and present their own summary for others read. To quote the author “That is, if two ideas are presented together in support of one concept, self-reflective students must learn to a) distinguish the ideas, b) understand the differences between and similarities between, c) understand where the connection points are if any, d) decide, based on analysis, which one (if any) they will include and build upon in their own learning process.”

Synthesis: Naturally following on from analysis (and also evaluation if Anderson and Krathwohl 2002 updating of Bloom would have it) the creation of new material from old – new ideas from old ones. This is potentially very powerful – empowering since it moves the student away from, what Reynard notes as ‘the information-exchange stage with students’.

And I’ve seen this. Students are indeed given topics to blog about but the ideas which they ultimately generate tend to be left – stranded. Ideally the curriculum should generate a ‘second wave’ of blogging.

Application: the application of knowledge and understanding to new and concrete situations – and gaining a higher level of understanding as a result. As Reynard notes ‘Without application, new ideas are not “owned” by students in their learning’. And there’s not enough ‘owning’ in my view.

3. Misuse of the environment
Basically think about why you wish your students to blog. As Reynard notes blogs are not discussion forums or wikis. They serve different purposes. Because the blog is ‘owned’ by a single person they retain natural authority in terms of frequency and, more importantly, content of posting. All subsequent comments are in response to that initial post. As such they are very empowering. “When using blogs to encourage students to articulate their thoughts students can become empowered and feel that they are developing their own voice in the learning process. Instructors can also “glimpse” students’ thought processes and become much more aware of their learning journey.”

4. Illusive grading practices
And of course construct an appropriate rubric and clearly outline it to the students. Reynard has some very good suggestions:

•“Reflection statements (self positioning within the course concepts);
•Commentary statements (effective use of the course content in discussion and analysis);
•New idea statements (synthesis of ideas to a higher level); and
•Application statements (direct use of the new ideas in a real life setting).”

The above relates to the composition of the original blog post but could easily be extended to the composition of the comments left by other students.

5. Inadequate time allocation
There’s never enough time and as we all know students have to assign priorities to their learning. Blogging needs to be seen as a serious priority if it is part of the course objectives. As such time needs to be given over for students to gather and digest information for their own post, to reflect and respond to comments left by others and to eave thoughtful comments on their classmates’ blog.

6. I decided to add a 6th mistake – Letting the conversation die.
Aside from journalistic reflective practice one of the ultimate goals of blogging is the actual conversation between the blogger and their readers – the community. As such the blog itself should be seen as only a part of the process. Other elements of the curriculum need to be brought into play if the conversation is going to be sustained. For example Clarence Fisher (Web Link) talks about how he re designed his classroom along the lines of a coffee lounge in order to sustain conversation outside of the blog. And also return to the blog. Starting the session off with one in-class exercise and then leaving students to blog outside of class will only get you so far. Instead greater emphasis needs to be paid to in-class activity which relates to the blog.

The full article can be found here.

I would be happy to hear from students who are currently engaged in blogging as a learning activity? Do you agree? Are there any other considerations?

Short paper which briefly looks at the opportunities offered by web 2.0 technology (wikis, blogging etc.) in terms of enabling students to become content creators. Consideration is given the notion of ‘pedagogy 2.0’ which is essentially a learner centred environment founded on constructivist principles.

“Pedagogy 2.0 is defined by:

• Content: Microunits that augment thinking and cognition by offering diverse perspectives and representations to learners and learner-generated resources that accrue from students creating, sharing, and revising ideas;
• Curriculum: Syllabi that are not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of bite-sized modules that are interdisciplinary in focus and that blend formal and informal learning;
• Communication: Open, peer-to-peer, multifaceted communication using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;
• Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes that are iterative, dynamic, and performance and inquiry based;
• Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are rich in media and global in reach;
• Scaffolds: Support for students from a network of peers, teachers, experts, and communities; and
• Learning tasks: Authentic, personalized, learner-driven and learner-designed, experiential tasks that enable learners to create content.”

And the outcome is: “With this learner-based, communal, media-rich, flexible approach, Pedagogy 2.0 uses social software tools to enable the development of dynamic communities of learning through connectivity, communication, and participation. “
It is brief but does a good job of raising the possibilities of such environments. A good staring point for discussion.

Anyway in relation blogging I thought I would link to this entry posted in the Sargent Park Math Zone – which school class blog (US). Basically the blog is used to deliver a math course in particular coordinating and setting tasks for the student blogging. One of the tasks is known as ‘Scribe’ blogging which I’ve posted about before.

Scribe blogging takes place on a class or group blog. These are blogs to which everyone in the class have the right to add posts (as opposed to your individual portal blogs). Anyway scribe blogging involves creating a daily blog post which summarises the day’s class room activity. Each student takes it in turn to provide the post. In this example the first student scribe is a volunteer and at the end of their post they are responsible for selecting the next student and so on until each member of the class has had their turn. An then the process repeats itself again.

The summary is usually covers what was learned in class for the day but in our context this could be the summary for the weeks module session etc. the students are explicitly told to include enough detail so that anyone who was absent for the lecture can catch up on what they missed. In our context this could be quite a challenge because a lot of information can be covered during a module session – one way round this would be to allow the students to record the lecture and uploaded and audio file providing summary notes etc. This is also touched on in this example where the students are encouraged to ask themselves “Is this good enough? Would a graphic or other example(s) help illustrate what we learned?”. So not just a straight forward text transcription of what the tutor was saying.

The end result would be that the scribe posts would grow into a textbook for the course written by the students for the students.

Here’s the link.