digital lifeboat

Weblogs: Learning in Public

Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway.
Published in On the Horizon, Vol 13, Issue 2, 2005. Pages 112-118.

Abstract

This paper relates a teacher’s experiences using weblogs with students, considering advantages and possible ethical questions that accompany this public, networked form of writing.Student work is usually only read by their teachers, making their educational system to be (like a game)d. This may cause a lack of motivation, a lack of confidence in the worth of their own work and may be a root cause of the current rash of plagiarism among students. (One possibility but not as big as poor time management and or laziness? )This prepares students for a networked world where communication is essential and often social and where writing can have
consequences.

Good point how much are we preparing kids at school for this?

Keywords

Weblogs, blogs, writing, web design, network literacy

Interesting narrative style paper outlining the issues arising from using weblogs, social pedagogical, ….
My comments from annotations to the text.

Walker describes the *new literacies* such as understanding networking and bi -directional links.

Quotes Stephen Johnson

[Blogging has] been a great stimulus for me, working out new ideas in this
public space – I’ve actually been about twice as productive as normal since I started maintaining the blog. The more I keep at it, the more it seems to me like a kind of intellectual version of going to the gym: having to post responses and ideas on a semi-regular basis, and having those ideas sharpened
or shot down by such smart people, flexes the thinking/writing muscles in a great way .

How does this work for those for whom normal conversational interactions do not flow easily or have low levels of literacy? How might this improve their literacy over time?

Strangers might read what they wrote! People outside of their classroom might seriously engage with what they write in class! Their work might matter, beyond
simply getting a grade and being one step closer to having a degree .

Again here is relevance to portfolio blogs. In schools We are intent on providing a walled garden safe environment, however this is totally anathema to the real world and the interaction between strangers, inclucing adloecents. Nevertheless due to our children’s vulnerabilities and lack of social discrimination we could not in truth do otherwise.

The paper ends with a discussion of ethical considerations in writing a review of another persons blog. In the account the bloger reviewed expressed distress at the review( he is suffering from mental illness. Due to an uncomfortable exchange Vegard Johnansen, a Norwegian blogger whose blog was among those reviewed by walkers students, was comfortable with having his work reviewed, but argued
that out of consideration for the individual writing the blog, you should avoid reviewing blogs about which you can’t write a positive review When you review a blog or a personal website there’s always an individual

who wrote it, so you should write a positive review of a site you enjoy rather

than a lukewarm review of a site you dislike or aren’t interested in. (Johansen

2004

Personally I don’t agree and I cannot believe that adult writers are not aware that their work is public, nor that total privacy settings were not available to the originally offended blogger.

The Blog and the Borg: a Collective Approach to E-Learning

Dr. Jon Dron, CMIS, University of Brighton, UK, jon.dron@brighton.ac.uk
http://www.it.brighton.ac.uk/staff/jd29/papers/dronelearn2003short.doc

Abstract: This paper describes the use of tools and procedures to encourage reflective learning in a blended-learning postgraduate course. Its ethos encourages self-organized collaborative learning with little taught theoretical content. Students use a variety of Internet-based communication technologies and reflect on their experiences in an online learning diary or “blog,”

The course is successful but its limited theoretical foundations, and technical and organizational problems caused by its blended delivery mode have led to student anxiety and have affected learning.

The problems have been overcome through structural and methodological changes, sometimes at the expense of compromising the course’s ethos. A new solution is proposed combining the use of blogs with CoFIND, a kind of “group mind amplifier,” leading to a technologically enhanced variant of Kolb’s learning cycle that may serve as an informative model for other technology-assisted courses.

Barriers: technological, organisational and pedagogical

The paper descrives in detail the barriers to learning which occured on the course in these areas and goes on to offer solutions.

Overcoming the barriers

.. technologies have been pared down to those which are both firewall- and user-friendly ,

Evidence of this happening in using KF technoligy last semster. There is no point in struggling using up as much time as we did getting kf to work when we could have used another technology.

Extrinsic motivation, structure and private study:

In future, assessment will be entirely based on the student blogs, with no explicit special study component. This not only renders plagiarism virtually impossible, but also the public, conversational nature of the blogs has been seen to improve intrinsic motivation.

Interesting evidence of the motivational importance in learning cycle.

With other demotivating factors and the lack of direct feedback , this led to difficulties encouraging students to write and share reflections

Here is a point needs to be considered for reflection in school childrens portfolio, without feedback the learning cycle is not closed. Perhaps teachers may have to set some entries as homework and feedback will be come a form of marking, minus the grade criteria.

Conclusions

Although stress can be an incitement to reflection, it is often a disincentive to learn .

Personal observation is that the latter is indicated by the huge drop out rate on the course last year. We have all lost out because of this not least those who have left!

When designing a course the ways that different technologies will assist in the learning process it should be made explicit.