Blogger-osophy

Now in a previous course during my Master’s adventure we focused on the philosophy behind using technology and in particular, educational technology (essentially any media you can use to “teach” with).  I am still a big fan of the whiteboard marker, not only can you write down words and content, but it also makes an excellent projectile to re-focus the students; soft enough to not leave a mark, pointy enough to wake them up.

However, the blog is a slightly more modern and trendy tool of late being used in education.  I have operated word-press photography blog (shameless self-promotional link in side menu) for over a year now and I really like using it.   For educational purposes, I previously used a Ning (read-when it was free) with mixed results; posting discussions and questions for students to respond to and then directing further discussion from there.  The best results occurred when they were given a topic they had selected earlier or when they picked up a relevant tangent from an earlier post.  Interestingly students also discussed lab photos and experiments when those were posted.

A blog is fairly easy to establish, though it does take some time to set one up well and the biggest difficulty, especially from an educational stand-point is generating dynamic conversation; by this I mean that growth and learning is observed from the discussions and even points of views can be adjusted or at least the participants are able to see other points of view.  Having glanced through a few blogs, too often the questions and prompts are too focused and terminate after a short discussion.

Blogs also pose a problem in that generally only the owner of the blog can post new topics and then other members are left to respond, though they may bring up new issues or future discussion topics with in another discussion.  I do like the potential of having students use them as a portfolio model and to use the discussions generated from their postings or work in a formative manner.  I have students doing a year-end presentation for Biology 12 this year, but I am pretty tempted to borrow the portfolio model of 565 and see how they do next year, as I suspect I should have provided them with more scaffolding.

So you ask, what is my philosophy behind using a blog? Well, it’s worth the time in effort if you have the time and effort to ensure it will facilitate dialogue and discovery if not try a different media.