Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

25 – Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
Most courses do not afford enough time for too much
trial-and-error learning. There are psycho-emotional
barriers and tech things as well.
Thinking of blogs as curricular innovation rather
than individual achievements helps create an upward
spiral of improvement. While we expect (and hope)
that students will graduate from our class and not
have to return to be taught the same material, the
products those students have produced in the previous
term or year can be highlighted, even if those
students have moved on. Choosing examples that
constitute best practices from the previous term also
helps to overcome psycho-emotional barriers as well
as tech problems. Think of the introduction of blogs
as a learning process for the teacher as well as the
students.
• Some of the important issues involved personal questions
of identity, voice and security, confidence and
audience.
For some students it takes time to build the confidence
needed to actually post, and to come to grips
with what blogging is about—it is quite different
from forum posting and traditional academic writing.
As we noted earlier, helping students make the
blog their own is of crucial importance. In this context,
getting students to think about how they present
themselves to others is key. What personal information
would the student like the teacher to know?
What to write is another problem, and one way to
address this is to give specific assignments, as well as the
kind of blog games recommended earlier in this chapter,
in the Expanding Horizons with Blogs section.
• Unsure … whether clear [targets] …work against
blogging. [Students get too caught up with] “How
many posts do I have to make?” “Does this count?”
In a traditional class, a student is expected to show
control (or ideally mastery) over the content presented.
However, this notion that there is discrete
content, separable from other facts and skills, is one
from which education has been moving away, towards
a goal that the student be able to use the content
presented in real-world situations. There is no
way to prevent some students from aiming to fulfill
only the minimum requirements, but blogging, in
common with many other online activities, does provide
a more-or-less automated way for the teacher to
ascertain if the student is working throughout the
term, rather than rapidly writing the requisite number
of blog posts in the evening before the final
evaluation.
• Private online forums seem to have a different dynamic
than blogs (ownership, identity, group, etc.).
This is very true, and such forums can prevent weaker
students from getting a foothold. Blogs, because they
constitute individual spaces, help overcome some of
the problems that can be seen in online forums.
• Unsure about community blogs. I think (tentatively)
they can help bridge to genuine personal blogs. But I
do know they can assist in achieving learning outcomes
… And I think they are different to forums.
While community blogs are a possibility, as noted
above, we view them as something best done subsequent
to personal blogging.
• I think blogs are sometimes a huge bonus in informal
professional learning settings. Sometimes they are not.
While we have presented an optimistic view of blogs,
preparing the groundwork for using blogs is timeconsuming,
just like introducing any new technology or
technique into the classroom. Providing opportunities
for peer review, self-evaluation, groupwork, or other
techniques can be described in the same way, so this is
not something that is a characteristic solely of weblogs
in particular or software in general.
Back to things not working. We just found it too
much to go from zero to blogging in one hit. The key
to using blogs in any educational context probably
starts with reading blogs. (Chirnside, 2006)
This point cannot be emphasized enough. Setting
aside time within the context of the classroom (in a
mixed class) or specifically requiring students to identify
good posts and link to them, adding their own thoughts,
is one of the things that has helped fuel the growth of
blogging in our classes.
ONLINE DANGERS
In addition to the specific issues with blogs dealt with
above, any type of online interaction presents certain
dangers in two directions. Teachers must not only consider
the social responsibility aspect but must protect
themselves from possible legal action. The first source of
danger is outsiders viewing what your class has done.
Strongly urge your students to avoid using their full
388 Education for a Digital World