For the past 6 weeks or so I have been reading Big Blogger on and off - I wasn’t really into in because there were too many people in it and too many posts to go scrolling through to try and understand it properly. But I have been voting each week because I looooove Vitriolica’s amazing artwork and her fun stories about Portugal and I wanted her to win.
In the past week however, the number of bloggers has been reduced to a manageable-for-me-to-read number (i.e. 4) to actually work out who is who and also to understand the personalities of each one much better. And I think the “tasks” for the bloggers are becoming more interesting - less superficial and more about the real people. So I have now fallen in love with all four of the remaining personalities and even though Vit MUST win, I am thoroughly enjoying the others as well.
If you haven’t voted for Vitriolica yet, please click the logo and head on over to do so :>
Honestly, Winter in Sydney is like Summer in Tasmania! It is the middle of Winter here but the afternoon was sunny and warm. I couldn’t resist a stroll through the park on my way to Broadway (shopping centre).
When I first read the title of this post, How you SHOULD use blogs in Education, the hairs on the back of my neck bristled. I hate being told what I SHOULD be doing - SHOULD is a very highly modal unfriendly word if you ask me. Anyway, once I calmed down and actually read the post, I was extremely relieved to find that it was pretty commonsense stuff. Here are the first two points:
You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course - This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…
You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion - One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation and subversion. Never, ever, mention number of words!
Because I used blogs as an assessment tool myself for a Master’s unit I ran last semester, I can support both of these points - keeping the structure loose enough for the students to explore and experiment was really important. I also told my students that they had to write within a minimum of 4 categories that included: something to do with their developing understanding of their selected topic based on theoretical reading; something that included examples / anecdotes / data and analysis related to their topic; something that showed they had found other blogs, other online material and teacher resources about their topic; and finally a fourth topic called OTHER - where they could write about anything else meaningful to them (their personal reflections, their own classroom context, memes and quizzes, whatever…). The “other” category was non-assessable. I was really impressed with their efforts - some of them did really amazing posts that went way beyond anything I could imagine. Its easy with post-grad students to give them a loose structure and say: PLAY.
It was a little more difficult with the undergrads I experimented with (*grin*). I gave them this assignment, where the students had to work in groups to discuss a scenario. I gave each group a scenario, a set of readings they could draw from to guide their discussion, and said: GO DISCUSS - they had to discuss until they had come to a conclusion and resolved the teaching dilemma that was posed in the scenario. Some students chose blogs, other chose forums, others did email groups - I left it pretty open but gave them the default WebCT as an option if they wanted (only one group in 25 groups used WebCT, which goes to show my hatred of it is shared by the students!!). Overall there were some absolutely fantastic responses, but I found that there was a bit of a hangup about how many words they had to write and how many posts they had to make and what if Melanie didn’t write as much as the others in our group and so on and so on (all that undergrad angst - ugh!). So I had to scaffold it a little more for some students. Most groups “got” the discussion angle though and really did brilliant responses - some had me rolling on the floor laughing because their discussions took so many unexpected turns.
I would like to write about these different experiences with blogging / online interactions some time but for now I have a long list of other writing commitments that I SHOULD be working on!
