Owen James
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Professional blog
Class blogs
This presentation focuses on how to develop, use, and apply a nomadic desktop (http://okoj.suprglu.com/) to daily teacher tasks and to ongoing, personal professional development anywhere the teacher is online.
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Nicole Ellison
Telecommunications, Information Studies, & Media, Michigan State University
http://tc.msu.edu/people/faculty/393
Yuehua Wu
Telecommunications, Information Studies, & Media, Michigan State University
Blogs are exciting to many educators, who argue that they can be integrated into learning activities to achieve a variety of pedagogical goals. For instance, Oravec (2002) argues that weblogs can reduce plagiarism and can help students critically assess online sources and develop a unique writing voice. Others argue that collaborative workspaces such as “wikis” and blogs enrich the learning experience in that they encourage students to revisit, revise and comment upon concepts and to evaluate and respond to the thinking of others. Because the format of blogs encourages students to engage with positions divergent from their own, blogging can potentially enhance analytic and critical thinking skills. Perhaps most importantly, the participatory and decentralized structure of these technologies discourages the “sage on the stage” approach to teaching and instead recalibrates communication patterns so that knowledge-sharing is increasingly student-to-student and student-to-instructor. Finally, incorporating online tools into curricula has the potential to shift learning from a time and space-bound activity that occurs only in the classroom within a specified period of time to an activity that is diffuse, ubiquitous, and concretely embedded in real world issues and events. Hybrid and purely online courses also can benefit from these active forms of Internet-based writing and discussion.
However, while there is much discussion about the potential benefits of these tools, more work is needed to assess their impacts and identify best teaching practices. This presentation will report findings from one of the first empirical studies exploring whether online writing offers a true pedagogical advantage over traditional writing projects submitted on paper. In Spring, 2005 a pilot study testing the effectiveness of blogs as compared to traditional papers in the classroom was conducted by the two authors. Over the course of a semester, students enrolled in an undergraduate course at a large Midwestern university participated in six short writing assignments. Half of these assignments were submitted as traditional, analog papers; the other half were posted online. For two of these online assignments, students posted comments on one another’s blogs. Although data analysis is still ongoing, preliminary analysis suggests that students particularly enjoyed the “commenting” feature of the blogs and felt blogging to be a useful and fresh approach to learning. Open-ended comments made by the student suggest that they saw the primary value of the online assignments to be the interaction with their peers. Findings from the study are reported, with an emphasis on practical as well as theoretical implications.
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