“…these new blog forms of discourse have generated renewed interest in reflective forms of writing to support learning (Cameron & Anderson, 2006)”
Terry, say it ain’t so! The availability of blogging services (i.e., blogging software) has driven a pedagogical shift to reflective learning? Is this because blogging makes reflective learning easy? Makes it sexy? Or because it reminds educators that reflective learning exists as an option?
A few sentences later, Anderson is tying himself into a pretzel in order to justify instructors’ grading participation in online forums — i.e., LMS discussion boards — which some students, he notes, consider akin to having their attendance taken. Why this pouting among students, and why would such grading need to be justified? Hasn’t participation in classroom discussions always been part of the assessment mix? It certainly was in all the undergraduate humanities classes I can remember taking in the 1970s and ’80s (though less so perhaps during my MLIS in the mid ’90s). Has non-attendance become a student entitlement in the intervening years?
For some, however, the practice of marking for participation seems only to recall the onerous practice of attendance marking that rewards the quantity, and not the quality, of participation (Anderson, 352).
Granted, Anderson seems to be alluding to marking via the crude statistics generated by LMSs, where number of posts is quantified much the way the number of times (and duration) students log onto the LMS. This accords the same weight to terse “I agree with you” posts as to longer, more thoughtful and more risky or challenging ones. If students think that’s how they’re graded then the instructor isn’t doing his job of informing them clearly as to how they’re assessed. If that is how they’re graded, then the instructor isn’t really doing his job, period.