Open and Distance Learning for Sustainable Development

Introduction
The University of New England (UNE) aims at student-centred constructivism, in a paradigm it
refers to as active learning – that is, students should be actively involved in constructing their
knowledge. Therefore, first, technology is indispensable for online resources at UNE, much more
so because of a proportionately large number of distance learners. Secondly, UN
E has to develop online contructivist frameworks, in the knowledge that, students born in or after
1980 were found to be largely digital natives (Kennedy, Krause, Judd, Churchward, & Gray,
2006). Hence, staff must be professionally developed not only technically, but also in the
pedagogical use of the ever-changing Information & Communications Technology (ICT). Thus,
UNE designed projects to identify challenges that debilitate staff and students against pedagogical
ICT use, to formulate frameworks for staff professional development, and ultimately to enhance
student learning through ICT.
We refer to Instructional Design (ID) as described for example by Dick & Cary (1990), but
including designing constructivist-learning environments. In that light and in concert, Sims,
Dobbs & Hand (2002: 137), recommend investigating end users’ needs and problems, and then
identifying an appropriate ICT to meet or solve the problems. However, lately, ICT are adopted in
education without focussed pedagogical goals (Mandinach, 2005: 2). Thus, the challenge is to
design pedagogical strategies for each ICT (Sims, 2006: 2). This approach makes ICT the
problem, for which pedagogical use has to be researched and questions the grounds upon which
institutions acquire ICT. Sims (ibid.) complicates the problem in stating that learning means
different things to ICT natives. Apparently, traditional pedagogies might not be applicable, and
transformation is required in institutional policies on implementation of ICT, as well as on staff
professional development. The rapid change additionally abandons ICT without exhaustive
utilisation or research, and pressurises staff to train in ICT skills and use. Thus, ICT adoption
requires serious attention.
It was from such attention that a research project was started at UNE, using blogs as a case study,
to identify challenges and formulate frameworks for professional development, as well as
pedagogy suitable for ICT. This paper, the first out of three, is about the first part of a study, and
illuminates upon the utilisation of blogs at UNE and nine other universities in Australia. ‘Use’ is
open and difficult to evaluate, since it is multivariate, and includes access and interactivity, which
are complicated terms. Not withstanding, in this study, ‘use’ includes all interactions staff and
students made through blogs. The aim of this phase of the study was to find out how UNE uses
blogs.
The study
Sample size
All the blogs at the UNE were studied between March 2007 and March 2008. A survey was
carried out on blogging between February and March 2008 in nine other Australian universities.
Methodology
Bartlett-Bragg (2003) advises for investigating pedagogical roles of ICT in context, such as
subject area and uses. However, traditional experiments about ICT adoption without clear
pedagogical objectives are complex. For example, defining control study groups or variables is
difficult (Mandinach, 2005: 1-2). Therefore, this study adopted a survey.
At a university home page, we browsed for blogs by typing the term ‘blog’ in the search link. The
UNE was the main focus because that’s where the authors work, and wish to design a professional
development in ICT framework. Two other universities, the Australian National University, and
the University of Sydney were selected on the basis of having busy and apparently useful blogs.
Another seven whose names are held back for ethical reasons, were randomly selected from a list
of Australian universities (http://www.australian-universities.com/list/).
Blog sites index a blog with the most recent post at the top. Therefore, active blogs, for example,
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