April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

eading blogs (i.e., reminders, easy sharing) as well. In contrast, comments from classmates and supervisors were
perceived to be of limited worth. We suggest that these findings support the framework of blogging affordances,
where reflection involves reading, writing, and exchanging comments. In fact, students explained the dissatisfaction
with comments to be due to lack of both depth and frequency. We thus infer that reflection is best facilitated by
blogging when the educational affordances are harnessed into the system. The technological characteristics of
blogging systems appear to be adequate to support these educational affordances. Our findings imply that the
inadequacy in employing blogging’s educational affordances might be associated with pedagogical factors that are
intrinsic in each particular internship program.
In the context of internship, our participants were required to write their reflections as blogs. Consequently, their
blogging behaviours were more focused on writing their own blogs, and giving rise to comments that were described
to lack depth. On the other hand, supervisors’ participation in the blogging activities may be constrained by limited
time resources, a desire to limit their impact on students’ independence of judgement during internships, or other
reasons. These factors associated with the context of internship appear to have important effects on how interns used
blogging for learning. Earlier studies have also shown that the pedagogical context of a course influences students’
blogging behaviours (Kerawalla, Minocha, Kirkup, & Conole, 2009). In this study, students tended to direct their
attention towards blog writing as a consequence of the internship context. While the nature of internship is distinct
from a classroom-based coursework, our findings imply the value of the pedagogical context of learning in utilizing
the educational affordances of blogging. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that our findings may have limited
generalizability to interns in other disciplines or fields of study. Future research work on using blogs for internship is
warranted to build on our findings.
Further studies might also examine the use of blogging as a learning tool during internship using other outcome
parameters. Interns reported generally positive perceptions on blogging for information and knowledge sharing, selfreflection,
social support, and communication for those who are placed overseas. While this is an encouraging basis
for future use of blogging in education, there is no causal mechanism that has been established. Furthermore, the lack
of association between frequency of use and interns’ perceptions imply that students’ blogging behaviours (i.e.,
amount of blogging activity) may relate to students’ views of blogging for learning. For educators, this brings about
the question of the actual utility of blogging as a tool for learning, which may be addressed by further research that
may delve into learning processes and outcomes. In conclusion, we found that in the context of internship, blogging
was found to be a generally useful tool that supports constructivist learning. Future applications of blogging in
education are also suggested to account for the pedagogical context which may include scaffolding strategies.
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