What's the value of blogs in higher education?

Blogging shouldn’t be seen as an isolated phenomenon, according to Marcus Donnell (2006*), who comments on blogging from a journalist’s perspective. It’s part of a whole set of set of practices conducted over the net. Blogs happen in the midst of many different cyber cultures. We are not just thinking about communicating in the blogosphere, it’s blogging within myspace, Myflikr, My librarything, My youTube, My delicious, My skype, My secondlife, My podcasting, if you’re a student - My online tutorial, each with their own culture and norms. All various forms of personal publishing.

So if we start thinking about what is happening in a group blog – how does this subvert the norm of blogging? Or does it? Does a group blog just represent a series of personal blogs jammed together, or do we get some other synergy happening? Maybe this is dependent on the level of authoring rights of those contributing to the blog. Perhaps it’s also dependent on context.

In terms of students using a blog for a group project to document process, I wonder how much the blog will be viewed as a personal vehicle for expression, rather than a group effort. Still more monologue than dialogue?

In our project with the drama students, the group blog is replacing individual student journals. So while documentation is still a key outcome, the practices around that documentation are quite different. It is a public and shared form of documentation, no longer a private contribution submitted only to the lecturer. It requires interaction with peers – but whether this means students get to know their peers any better or establish stronger learning communities is to be revealed. Group blogging is a digital record on the web, available for scrutiny as it develops, a formative document - unlike the traditional student journal, printed out in hard copy and presented as a summary evaluation on demand.

No doubt we can expect to see some differences in outcomes.

I want to know if students share more ideas or resources using blogs as a digital record than they would just meeting face-to-face each week. We’ll know in about 6 months I guess!

Some student blogs to compare from the Vine Drama Project look like this:

JeMeGe, secondary students: entries are individually posted under a single account http://jemege.vineblogs.net/

Little inventors, primary students (Year 6?): each post is generated by the group , not individuals
http://class6m.vineblogs.net/



* O'Donnell, M. (2006). Blogging as pedagogic practice: Artefact and ecology. Asia Pacific Media Educator, (17), 5-19.

Video Games and Engineering

This is a great example of authentic, complex learning environments. In an advanced computing course at Northern Illinois University, mechanical engineering students work in teams to program and create video games. After creating their virtual models, students can enrol in another course and take their designs to the next level, and turn them into real products, real racing cars.

Group blogging

My colleague Jenny and I have been playing around some more with the group blog idea - testing things out so we can predict issues students might come up against this semester in their drama course, when they use blogs to help with the play building process.



You can see what we been up to here on the Timetoplay blog.






It’s interesting using a blog which is really a tool designed in the first instance for single authorship, as a group authoring tool. Once you introduce multiple authors, you need to think about the way primacy is given to the main author's entries - comments from others are nested away at a secondary level of access. The reader is directed to the first author entries, not the secondary comments. (Using the tagging function will be important if you want to find anything buried on the blog in a comment.)

If you’re working a group blog and all entries are of equal weight then everyone will need first author rights to post (upload files and rights to manage the site). Each author may tend to create new posts each time too, rather than adding an entry as a ‘comment’, so as to keep their posting at the highest level – not lost in the shadows of the blog. This will be interesting to track in the context of writing within a students' group blog which is assessed.



BTW: This group blog for Women in the Media and News has 50 authors - so anything is possible I guess!

Learning Spaces

A vision of students today

Have you seen this video about university students' views on their education? It begins with a comment by Marshall McLuhan. If McLuhan did say this in 1967, then the scary thing is the quote could’ve been talking about me – I was one of those bewildered children learning in that 19th century environment that McLuhan talks about – in a secondary setting - looking out the window wondering why class was so tedious. At the same time I thought almost everything we were studying was interesting. Just the school bit was boring and slow. When I went back into the classroom not too many years after leaving school as a trainee teacher, I naively wondered why the classrooms were the same. I’d expected radical change - after only about 4 years. That was in the 1970s. Thirty years later and it’s business as usual: in both the K-12 and higher education sectors development is patchy.

Chris Johnson and Cuprien Lomas in ‘Design of the learning space: Learning and design principles’ (Educause Review, July/August 2005, 16-28) talk about the way the physical spaces we build for learning reflect the values of the institutions that provide them. For instance, do large lecture theatres, where students sit passively day after day taking down notes, reflect the educational values we most want to encourage in students? Does frequent use of this space set up a pattern of dependence that is difficult to change? How many of us are modelling active, collaborative, independent thinking in lecture halls? Have you put yourself on the other side of that lectern lately? This is not to say that lectures don’t have a place – but their continued dominance in the expected everyday pattern of students in higher education astounds me.

'It's not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest'. Charles Darwin (Source)

Blogs and wikis

A colleague and I are investigating group blogs and wikis for a third-year drama course. The following sites are interesting.

Blogs generally
Screencast on blogs, by Brian Lamb.
This screencast sits on Brian Lamb’s wiki, Beyond the Blog, where there are other links to information about social software.

Group blogs
We're looking at group blogs because students in the course are collaboratively making their own plays. A group blog might help with process. We've been looking at the traditional solo blogging software, but there is other collaborative software which might be of interest. Robin Good has some suggestions worth checking out.

Blog styles - examples
Journalism, group blog style: ABC Unleashed.
Politics around the 2007 election. Plenty of audio and video.

A poem a day: Gardner Writes
Low workload solo blogging. Gardner reads a poem by Donne and talks about his poetry. You can comment in text or audio.

Student site: Broadcasters of Tomorrow
Nominated for the Reuters Student Journalism Award 2007.
Lots of Youtube links.