So – you’ve heard the buzz about how easy it is to use weblogs and the benefits of using blogs as a teaching tool in the classroom. Are you thinking about using a blog in one of your courses, but wondering where to start?
Getting and learning how to use a blog is the first step – they’re free from UBC’s Office of Learning Technology for the UBC community and there are plenty of workshops and tutorials to show you how simple they are to use.
But – are you also wondering how to integrate weblogs into the curriculum, what your students can with it, and how to get them to use it? Since weblogs are still such a new phenomenon in education and everywhere else, there aren’t any right or wrong answers to these questions, but there are lots of possibilities.
For Simon Neame, an adjunct instructor with UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), learning by trial and error has helped him discover that blogs can be used in a range of ways, from a tool to manage course information, demonstrating professional tools and increasing student ownership in the classroom, to meeting learning objectives.
Collaborative Blog as an Administrative and Community Tool
Simon teaches a graduate seminar in Collections Management, in addition to his full time position as the program coordinator with the Irving K. BarberLearning Centre. He has used weblogs in the course twice – the first time was in January – April 2003, and the second time in January – April 2004.
At first, Simon mainly thought of the weblog as an administrative tool. He used it alongside other activities and assignments, primarily as a means of posting class notes and presentations, and information about assignments.
However, Simon also recognized the blog’s potential for engaging students in online discussions and contributing to the course. All the students were able to publish individual postings to the weblog. Instead of just responding through the comments function to postings Simon published, he encouraged students to post their own links to articles and resources related to the course content.
One of the biggest benefits for setting up the blog this way is that students were able to take ownership of their own learning process.
“It was another way for students to contribute,” said Simon. “It wasn’t just me posting resources that they should look at.”
They also shared knowledge and experience gained in previous professional experience relevant to the course topics.
“The blog has a lot of potential for acknowledging contributions, experience and prior knowledge or expertise that students bring with them to the classroom, especially in professional programs, where people come with previous experience,” said Simon.
Lessons Learned: Simply Using Blogs Benefits Students, But Direct Connections Are Key
One of the challenges Simon faced, however, was getting students to publish to the blog on a regular basis. Although Simon invited the students in each course to use both the comments function and to publish their own postings, the results were mixed. Some students published regularly, while others only posted once or twice.
“The first time I used it, the class was smaller, there were about 27 students,” said Simon. “They used it as a space to meet and discussion issues related to the course topic. The second time, students tended to use it more as a tool, and less as a community space.”
Simon said several factors may have contributed to the different ways students in both courses responded to the blog: the different sizes of each group, varying student interests, and the seminar format of the graduate course, which already builds in a great deal of discussion among students.
But he also thinks that the way instructors structure and promote the tool in class is a key factor in how students engage with the blog during the course.
“Students need to have a reason to go to the blog,” he said. “If you set an interesting challenge, people will use it.”
Simon said he thinks that actively promoting the blog to students throughout the course, by encouraging people to use it, talking about it and regularly bringing it their attention, would make a difference in how they engage with it.
Even so, for Simon, students benefited simply from being introduced to the weblogs because they are a key professional tool in library and information studies which they’ll encounter in their careers.
Students in other disciplines could also benefit from increased awareness and experience with weblogs as potential resources for their future careers. In addition to education and library and information studies, blogs are widely used in a variety of industries in the corporate and non-profit sectors and in fields such as public relations, marketing, and journalism, as well as for personal publishing.
“Even if the students don’t use it a lot during the course, even if they just post a couple of times and read others students’ posts, they’ve seen what it’s about,” said Simon. “It’s at least showing them that these tools are out there.”
Meeting Learning Outcomes and Students’ Needs
The next time Simon teaches the course, he plans to integrate the weblog more fully into the course curriculum and learning outcomes, rather than just using it as an administrative tool.
“Next time I teach this course, I definitely want to use the blog,” he said. “There is huge potential and it’s a great tool for the learning experience. Integrating the blog into learning outcomes would be my goal, in addition to using it as an information management tool.”
One possibility he is considering is using the blog as a case study and forum for discussing the use of weblogs in the library profession.
But overall, Simon said the most important thing is determining how a weblog can help you meet your teaching needs and your students’ needs, whether you integrate the blog as part of the curriculum, as an administrative tool or in other ways.
Simon’s Advice for Using Weblogs in Education
Simon has some suggestions for other instructors who are interested in using weblogs in the classroom, which could apply to almost any discipline, not just library and information studies.
- Make direct connections between the blog’s relevance and highlight how it fits into the course and what students are learning.
- Create some guidelines to help give students ideas about what and when they can contribute to the blog. “People need to have a reason or more direct question or theme to guide the way they use the blog,” said Simon.
- Providing resources or themes can help spark discussions and give students a starting point for their own postings. (Editor’s Note: Stephen Downes argues that students need to read before they can write, towards the end of his article on Educational Blogging. Setting deadlines or using the blog as a student publication could also help provide incentive for students to contribute postings on a regular basis.)
- Since students’ schedules are already overloaded, integrating the blog with other course activities, such as an assignment or participation component, could help alleviate the workload while relating the blog to the rest of the course.
Regardless of exactly how blogs are used in the classroom, the only hard and fast rule is that there are no rules for blogging in education. This is good news, because it means the possibilities for adapting weblogs to suit your students’ needs and your course curriculum are wide open.
Articles and Resources:
- Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes. The process of blogging – of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online – is a process of bringing life into learning.
- PH.Dotcom: What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia. By Geeta Dayal
Article courtesy of UBC’s e-Strategy Update