Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector

By: Jeremy B. Williams, Universitas 21 Global and Joanne Jacobs, Queensland University of TechnologyCitation: Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, Vol 20, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 232-247

The article that I read for this assignment is a bit older but I found it had great relevancy both to the topic of blogging and to the topic that Jay and I are writing on for the Organization and Administration class. The topic we are addressing for that project deals with critical thinking and reflection. The part that blogging played in allowing students to apply these skills was particularly important for the instructors in the study.

The authors of this article were looking at blogging in the 2004 timeframe when it was projected that there would be 10 million blogs by the end of the year. In 2009, Pingdom, an online resource, reported that there were about 126 million blogs on the internet. At the time of the writing of this article however, blogging was still being explored as a tool in the classroom and this paper was a report on the use of blogging in only a couple of classes within the MBA program at Harvard.

The article includes several tables which were designed to weed out those that participated and those that didn’t and why, but didn’t always do so because students defined their own meaning of participation. By this I mean, and this was the interesting note from this first set of data, many students felt they were participating by “lurking”. This was what they meant by lurking.

“Reading what other people were writing was valuable. It was therefore not so much a choice of not participating, it was more a choice not to contribute. I viewed myself as having participated, and will therefore answer the rest of the questions.”

The survey questions went on to identify whether the students involved felt they gained from the experience, would do it again, what the benefits were. Some bottom lines from the experience were:
1) Provided a good medium for intellectual exchanges
2) Provided additional time for discussion on topics that classroom did not
3) Allowed students to formulate answers prior to putting them “out there” (critical thinking and reflection)
4) Allowed for a deeper understanding of the topic material

Some issues that I saw with the evaluation of the blogging experience were:
1) It was offered online—so the evaluation only reached the same demographic as those that blogged
2) The response was 50% (very good for a survey—CGSS would love to get this type of response), however, still doesn’t get at 50% (that is why the survey that K-State does that has everyone respond at the end of class is much better
3) So what this means is when you say 50% saw utility in something—it is really 50% of 50% and do you make changes in curriculum based on what is 25% or less—when the 50% is a combination of several categories from the likkert scale?

This study was beginning to get at where the educational field was headed with blogging and made a case for those that don’t get actively involved. It did not say, however, what to do about those “participant-lurkers”. It was forward thinking and addressed the areas of critical thinking and reflection that blogging allows for some students. All in all this was a good article and study. The students were very positive considering the early phase of blogging and indicated that they would blog whether they were getting graded for it or not, although I think it would be interesting to see the demographic breakdown on some of this data.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/