How you SHOULD use blogs in education
Following on from how NOT to use blogs in education this post attempts to summarise this paper and add a few extra angles onto how you can use blogs effectively in education and invites your additional hints, tips, criticisms & wotnot.
You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course - This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…
You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion - One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation and subversion. Never, ever, mention number of words!
You should use blogs for what they are good for - Blogs are by no means the answer to everything, they are very strong alternative communication tools but if you want to build quizzes, run polls, have near-synchronous conversation, do listserv-y kind of discussion or strictly manage just about anything then you’ll probably want to look at another tool. Use blogs to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.
Use proven and effective blogging tools - When you decide to set off on your blogging journey don’t, please don’t, do it with some ‘tacked on solution’ to a large and established Learning Management System. Blogs are just as complex as any other form of software and you want to get the tools off people who know what they’re doing. You probably wouldn’t pick up an office suite from Macromedia, would you… Look at all the options and chose a proven path, there are lots of them.
- Posted on: July 29th, 2005
- 26 Comments
- Category: Education, Featured, Just Blogging
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I have really enjoyed these recent posts about blogs in education. Although I am not a student or a teacher, I am a mother and have found blogs to be a useful tool with my children. We have two ‘educational’ or ‘interactive’ blogs that we use on a weekly basis with them.
One is thepostcardproject.com, which my eight year old started last year. He got a map for his birthday and wanted to learn more about the places on it. We asked for postcards and he gets a few new cards each month. We research the people and customs of the area and post the card online. This blog relies on the participation of others [sending in cards], so the posting is sporadic.
The second is ninesidesofsunday.blogspot.com. It functions as a photo meme for the kids. Each Sunday, I give the kids [we have 7 at home] an assignment and they have to take and edit the pictures themselves. I have found that this is an effective way to get them thinking about their surroundings.
I imagine that these types of blogs would work well in an educational setting.
how about just leave it in the hands of the kids/students - just make them aware of proper guidelines for publishing on the internet, and what the consequences can be…
But then what would I do for a living
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How NOT to use blogs in education
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Guidelines for Using Blogs in the Classroom
In case there is anyone reading my blog who has not read all the others where this is posted and because I know I will want to use this in the future I just wanted to link to James Farmer’s How your SHOULD use blogs in Education. I would have expected…
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[...] In one of my earlier posts, Critical Thinking, Blogging, and Educational Reform, I presented a short review of James Farmer’s How You Should Use Blogs in Education and How Not to use Blogs in Education. They offer some very good guidelines on how to use blogs for educational purposes. For me, they answered a number of questions that I was wrestling with about how blogs “work” in connecting people that is different from a forum. For educational purposes, blogs do, indeed, create a different dynamic than a more goal-centred forum. [...]
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[...] When chosing blogs to use in the classroom there are several factors to include in your final decision. The following article covers four brief points for thought that include everything from blogging tools to effective bolg use in your class. http://blogsavvy.net/how-you-should-use-blogs-in-educationKyle Kϋhner [...]
[...] From Ann Davis comes a reflection on the posting in District Administration that highlights a number of ways that blogs might be used, not without underlining the need for their careful use in schools with regard to some control over the content of posts. James Farmer summarises his paper on blogging in education which posits blogging firmly in the realm of social networks by its nature of communication being the over-riding mechanism of knowledge transfer, rather than the traditional content-driven learning model. Content still exists but it is placed more into the hands of the learner to construct meaning from. Extract from James’ paper (with my emphases): Wells (2000) further developed Vygotsky’s work and contributed to the assertion that all learning is socially constructed through language and is in some way collaborative, even when direct human contact is absent. Adapting this theoretical perspective, the new model will emphasise that the key to the collaborative component of learning is a process of inquiry within a social group and the construction of meaning through the exploration within the specific social context. [...]
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News from other blogs (26/12/05)
You’ll not be surprised to learn that this isn’t the only education-related blog on the Internet. There are a multitude of other blogs - most, admittedly, HE-focused - which give much pause for thought. Here’s some I’ve come a…
[...] The rather amusing (albeit bizarre) OLE! Tango blog has a post on Orchestrating a Learning Ecology which links to an elearnspace article on Learning Ecologies, Communities, and Networks. The best summary comes from the latter article itself: An ecology is an environment that fosters and supports the creation of communities. The definition applied to gardening applies well to learning communities: "“Ecological gardening is about gardening with nature, not against it.” A learning ecology is an environment that is consistent with (not antagonistic to) how learners learn. Blogsavvy has two complementary posts on How you SHOULD use blogs in education and How NOT to use blogs in education. The overview is simple: use blogs for what they’re good for and don’t expect miracles! [...]
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How you SHOULD use blogs in education
Some very good pointers here by James Farmer on how you should use blogs in education. Follows on from his article how NOT to use blogs in education.
I particularly like the points
“Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs …