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Why Blog? (Part 2)
Blogging is a different approach; the classroom is one space that blogging can occur for learners; the emphasis, however, needs to be to invite learners to step out of their well-worn shoes as students, and determine what they want to write, why, and for whom. If blogging is used by teachers to reinforce the rules of conduct and the power relationship that exists in classrooms, then blogging as a strategy will fail. period. Why blog for your teacher, writing what your teacher wants? Why learn these skills when the act of writing makes you vulnerable to others' scrutiny?
Bloggers blog for their own reasons; not for grades, not to complete their assignments.
Bloggers don't consciously say that they are going to blog to develop their academic writing skills, or cultivate their social skills. Why expect our students to be persuaded to blog to attain these goals?
Learners need to gradually move their zone of comfort to a liminal zone, a place of transition, and rely on a group of trusted others for support. Learner autonomy is developed gradually as their net efficacy grows, as does their self efficacy in general. The learning is a pendulum: a swinging back and forth between the blogger as self-reflective, and the blogger as an embedded self. Self-reflective blogging requires learners to engage in an internal dialogue made explicit through text, with one's own voice as a vehicle for self-expression. An embedded self is more aware of the impact of others' perspectives, is more analytical, and blogs to engage in a broader conversation with oneself and others. Such bloggers enjoy expressing ideas, and enjoy receiving a series of comments from trusted others, and then is positively challenged to engage in re-incorporating these ideas, reflecting on them, and reiterating the ideas in more complex ways.
Encouraging attitudinal shifts in learners is what will bring about the boost in confidence and motivation in learners to blog.
Glenn Groulx
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Comments
Hi Glenn
In general I agree with you and the edublogger gurus (Siemens, Downes, Richardson etc) would as well. But I fear that without external incentives, many externally motivated students won't participate. I hope in your portal, you will be able to survey designs that teachers use to inspire the uninspired.
But thanks for the post!
Hello Terry,
What indeed to do with the reluctant blogger?
If students will not participate as active bloggers without external incentives, then ask them to come up with own internal incentives. Telling them to blog is not a good idea, as the very nature of blogging is built upon respect for personal volition. Without choice, there is no blogging activity, only a sorry excuse for it.
Rather than getting students to blog, I would prefer to approach it from another way: offering learners the choice to blog their ideas, opinions, and processes, rather than requiring them to write an essay, or take a test, or make a presentation.
Offer students the choice over who will be their validators, their evaluators, to make up a committee that will act as mentors, offer feedback, and provide structure and guidance as needed. The evaluators could be parents, adult community member, their instructor, other instructors, and other fellow students in higher grades.
My own basic requirement for students who blog is that they in fact choose to blog, and choose their evaluators who model the blogging process. Each of the mentors need to have active blogs. Students who blog under these circumstances are offered an opportunity to interact with a group of fellow bloggers, sharing ideas as a learning community.
Glenn
Hi Glenn,
I really like your ideas and the structure you suggest for learners to have a say in how they are to progress, express themselves, and be evaluated. Your ideas are innovative.
Jo Ann
Glenn,
Thanks for introducing me to the act of blogging. I don't know anything about blogging, so this introduction has targeted my initial barriers as to the process and the obstacles in blogging. I particularly like the differences between a forum and a blog-- between offering choices or a forced educative process.
May I use some of your information here and offer your advice to students? And, most importantly, where do you recommend setting up blog space? All we have at my college is forum and discussion space-- so far behind the times we are... Penny
Hi Penny
Thanks for your comments. I wanted to address "where to blog" but your digital footprint ie profile is so thin, I don;'t really have any idea what context you are immersed in. In any case, you can obvious blog here, since you have an account. If you want to bring students in I think Edublogs.org is a very good resource. They are good folks and have services designed for schools. Of course there are other services (like blogger.com) or if you have capacity installing your own WordPress suite is also fine. If you blog external to Me2U- remember to set it to import so we can benefit from your posts here in Me2U!!
Terry
Good luck
Hi Penny, Terry, JoAnn,Thank you all for your comments, and advice.Penny, Terry Anderson is my professor for the MDDE663 independent studies course. Terry, JoAnn, Penny Poole is a classmate of mine from the MDDE612 (experiential learning) course. We just finished moderating a forum discussion on the use of metaphors and transformative educational theory. :)Penny, JoAnn is a colleague, who was a classmate of mine from MDDE605 (business planning).Penny, as Terry suggested, Edublogs is an excellent free hosting service. It is very easy to set up. And you can quickly show the students how to set up a blog. The technical skill needed is not going to be too cumbersome for most students used to FaceBook and Bebo already. You can also try blogger.com, but for that you need a gmail account as well. This might cause quite a few headaches about passwords, etc. and make more work for you as the technical support go-to person.If you are looking for an online system to manage your students, and have them all sign up to create their own blogs and connect them all together, then I strongly recommend the NING network at www.ning.com . It offers a forum, a file management system, a social networking system to keep track of updates. And it allows you to act as administrator, to give you the chance to monitor blogs of your students and forum discussions.However, for now, the most important step I think is for you to start an edublog, at edublogs.org, and slowly gently encourage your students to do so, too, after they have spent some time checking out similar blogs. Don't get students to start posting comments to your contributions right away.Instead, invite some fellow bloggers from the field of sociology as guest contributors. Add links to their blogs in your own, and comment on their ideas, even modelling the proper use of MLA/APA citation format you expect. Encourage students to draft ideas on the blog, as the basis of their own later work on their assignments.Direct them to other blogs they might be interested in, and include links to web sites and online sources from your blog. Modelling the use of the blog as a means to track the progress of homework assignments, encourage them to give opinions on movies, novels, TV shows, and books and articles, and modelling activities such as the use of memes, talkbalk, waymaking, and roleplays involving imaginary dialogies could be a cool introduction for your learners. Don't use the blog as a noticeboard, as a forum, or as a requirement for participation. Don't require minimum weekly posts, and don't structure the content too much. Offer a rubric for commenting students can use to assess their blogging contributions and comments. As an incentive, I would offer this activity for bonus marks, perhaps for up to 5% of the final mark.Explain that the more they blog, and respond to the materials in the manner that makes sense to them, the more they will have an opportunity to work with the materials and get experience first-hand of how academic scholars engage in discourse. Encourage some students to begin group blogs of their own, and introducve the differences between group blogs and the individual blog. Allow students to make their own choices about what options they wish to make, but emphasize that this is something students can choose to do, or not to do. I am going to be discussing stategies of using edublogs for emanipatory learning. Story-telling, webquests, and the formation of informal learnign circles among individual learners might be agreat way to introduce learners. Let me know if you have further questions, Penny.I am in the process of putting together a literature review based on more than a dozen case studies on the use of edublogs from around the world in different areas. I am excited by the preliminary results from that: a clearer pattern is emerging of what works, and what doesn't. Several key things are needed as preparation for increasing the chance of success.More on this later this week.Glenn