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Opinion
Instructional Strategies for Blogging
Statement categories and the development of the individual learning voice
5/9/2007
Additionally, the time to complete the course blog should coincide with the final exam at the end of the course. That will mean that students are more likely to continue blogging throughout the course and take time to do the reading and various other assignments before completing the blog. This, in turn, means that the students will find it more helpful to their learning process and ultimately in the summarizing of the course in their minds and the application of key points to real-life. In other words, if the blog is clearly integrated into the course design, it should facilitate the entire learning process.Integrated Use
Blogging should not be perceived by students as an additional task or an assignment that sits outside the main flow of the course. Students should be encouraged to view their blogging as their personal learning space through the course that connects everything together and make sense of the various aspects of the course such as projects, research, and writing. This will mean that as students interact with course material, interact with each other, interact with the instructor and the wider academic or professional field relevant to the course of study, their blogs should be evolving throughout. The instructor should be able to see the individual learning path of each student through his or her blog progress, which, in turn, will provide the instructor with a better understanding of the learning needs of each student. This allows the instructor to provide effective and direct intervention for each student when needed. This is particularly helpful in processing abstract concepts for analysis.
Grading Value
Grading does seem to motivate the students, but it seems to be more effective to grade according to effort in relevancy to course content and outcomes than simply on numbers of submissions (Reynard, 2005).
Whatever type of grading you choose for the blog (self-, peer-, or instructor-reviewed), it should be clearly communicated and explained to the students, and it should be equally distributed through the blog statement response. That is, if critical thinking is one of the learning outcomes of the course, then critical thinking statements that appear in the blogs should be valued, and students should be encouraged to see the value of their blog work. Additionally, if self-reflection is key to the process, then that should be valued in the grading, and so on.
Maximizing Published Work
One student's comments to me about the blogging experience are relevant here: "The blog helped me to 'print' my ideas rather than just think them."
It is helpful if instructors focus students from the beginning of the course on the "published" environment of their blog. That is, they should take care to construct their thoughts coherently and contextually for others to read. If students struggle with the idea of the blog being "public" to the Internet, then the class should at least create a blog ring of their project group(s) and subscribe to each other's blogs. This will still provide a sense of a wider audience and achieve the same results. Peer review here helps with that sense of added publication value.
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