Day 4 – Concerns with blogging: a student perspective
This week’s great outlined the opportunities for blogging very well and brought up some great points within each section of the page. My experience with blogging began very recently with the start of this course in September. Prior to this class I had never participated in blogging for personal or academic purposes.
Regarding my own experience and as pointed out in Day 4’s section, blogging can be very time consuming especially when this is familiar territory. Fulfilling the requirements of a good, constructive post I think takes alot of time, especially when it involves embedding images, videos or another other multimedia that may add to a post. This is even more taxing when you have little to no prior knowledge on how to navigate a blog and fully utilize all that it has to offer.
As pointed out in Day 1 “blogs are a new form of media literacy” (Davies in http://etec522blogs.wordpress.com/what-is-blogging/, 2011). Literacy learning is a process and just as developing critical reading and writing skills takes time and involves various components so does critical blogging. While crictical writing and reading skills are transferable in the sense that students are able to use these when writing/reading a post a new technological component/skill is required to develop these skills within this new literacy.
Being able link to relevant articles and websites, write about them, consider them and connect them all become as important as in report or essay writing with a tech twist. Linking to more than one external site in one entry also becomes an important function of good blogging and connects separate things with a personal perspective. However, student blog usage will not increase learning without appropriate content, scaffolding and strategies (Top, Yukselturk, Inan, 2010). These new skills will have to be developed for students to blog effectively and while I have never used blogging as an educator I do believe that we must then have some prior development of these “critical blogging skills” as well as the basics of navigating a blog and I’m sure many teachers are aware of and doing this.
Top, Yuselturk and Inan (2010) noted that future research of blogging might also investigate blogging in teacher education courses so that teachers’ attitudes, and beliefs are also considered “…to improve generalizability of the study and future research should include large number of preservice teachers from diverse subject areas”. Blogging then becomes important in education from both spectrums student learning and teacher learning as the former becomes dependent on the latter.
This group has done a good job in showing what then needs to be incorporated into the learning process of blogging and its use as a new literacy. What we must also be mindful of as educators is that students encompass many different learning styles and some may take to blogging as a learning tool more than others.
References:
Davie, A. in What is Blogging, 2011. Retrieved from http://etec522blogs.wordpress.com/what-is-blogging/
Top, E. Yukselturk, E. and Inan, F. (2010). Reconsidering usage of blogging in preservice teacher education courses. The internet and Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751610000503
Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
bcourey 2:32 pm on October 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Jay for your kind comments! You are right that blogging is an excellent avenue to include critical literacy in your classroom – what better way to teach students about internet safety, etiquette and digital footprint than by showing them great examples of student blogs that are out there. Thanks too for your link to the preservice teacher article.
jenaca 12:18 am on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hey Jay, thanks for your insightful post! Like you, I had never blogged before this course, so I found it very different from anything I had experienced in the past. I agree that blogging can be very time consuming and with the overloaded days we all have, I know it is very difficult to find time to post a “good” blog. For me, this includes writing, editing, re-writing, proof-reading (maybe even having someone else read it) then finally posting. Do you think blogging will get easier with more experience?
I really like your closing statement, “What we must also be mindful of as educators is that students encompass many different learning styles and some may take to blogging as a learning tool more than other”. This is true in so many ways! As educators we must acknowledge that every student has different learning needs, and when it comes to blogging, this might just be the answer for some!
Jenaca
Jay 9:03 am on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I definitely think that with time it would become easier. Just as writing your first research paper can be a very daunting task, over time we develop the necessary skills and are able to complete these tasks in less time and with greater ease. I think what I was trying to get at in my post is that if educators are going to use blogging as a teaching tool and incorporate it into the class, teachers have the responsibility to help students develop these skills so they can blog effectively. I found for this course the tutorials and the “How to use this blog” as well as the links to wordpress and diagrams showing how to perform certain tasks (embed images, video) very helpful and would have been lost without it.
Deb Kim 11:29 pm on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thank you for your thoughtful insights.
Although I’ve used a blog for teaching purposes I’ve never used it for my learning. I’m currently managing 3 different blogs for the 3 classes I’m teaching, plus this blog. I agree with you that blogging is indeed time-consuming, especially if you are not familiar with it. For some, they need time to learn and adjust to it. Just like us educators, students also need time to get used to blogging. As you mentioned, each person’s learning style is different. It took a few weeks for my students to get used to blogging because they’ve only used Moodle so far. My duty as an educator is to help them learn how to be a “good blogger”. Their cyberspace behaviour and responsibility can be determined by what they learned and didn’t learn from their teacher who introduced blogging to them. I feel responsible for their behaviour in virtual space. That’s why I spend time to go over “cyberspace” rules with them before I introduce blogging.
Deb