Blogs are a relatively easy technology to install, maintain and use. They can package entries in attractive ways through the use of HTML stylesheets, enable people without knowledge of HTML to publish to the Web, and facilitate the sharing of ideas through a comments form. Within hybrid and fully online courses, blogging can be an effective tool to promote sociocultural and constructivist instruction models through a high degree of interactivity, learner-generated observations, and peer input. Learners can use blogs to bridge new information with prior learning. This article reviews such uses of blogging and provides examples that illustrate its potential.

Instructional Applications of Blogging

Much has been learned about the ability of the Web to nurture, foster, and enable community. Certainly, the Web has afforded new ways to network people dispersed across a broad, invisible system of bytes and nodes. The ubiquity of the Web is matched by the anonymity that it affords. People will volunteer personal and family experiences, ask for assistance along intimate themes, and initiate dialogues with total strangers (Glogoff 2001). As Powazek (2002) notes, "Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time." The appropriate tools empower participants to say what they think and receive feedback quickly from others. In an instructional environment, we observe the value of different communications tools, such as email reply, listservs, chat rooms, instant messaging and blogs to cultivate personal bonds with and among students and to promote extended dialogue about key topics.

In comparison to these other communications tools, however, instructional blogging offers additional opportunities to engage students and extend the virtual classroom. In assessing the usefulness of blogs as an e-learning tool, we can draw from concepts presented by Terry Anderson (2004, 238-240) and Ruth Colvin-Clark and Richard Mayer. Anderson writes that learning realizes its potential when instruction is knowledge-centered, learner-centered, and community-centered. Blogging has enormous potential in each of these areas. To begin with, instructional blogging may be seen as knowledge-centered when it focuses on the key organizational concepts of a discipline’s knowledge domain. The course that I teach for the University of Arizona’s School of Information Resources and Library Science, Decision Making for Information Professionals, is modular in design (Exhibit 1). (2004) It leads students through a process in which they build an understanding of such topics as technological evolution, information architecture, strategic planning, learning objects, content management, and usability. By the end of the course they have analyzed the deeper structures necessary to make sound decisions when evaluating information systems for use or purchase.

Learner-centered blogging acknowledges the important attributes of learners as individuals and as a group. Examples of this occur when, as the instructor, I give positive feedback to a student for something written in a blog entry or when I add comments to a thread two or more students are discussing (see Exhibit 2 for an example). The capability to provide positive feedback in an online course via the comments section to blog entries is particularly useful given that students find themselves dispersed across the Internet and many miss the face-to-face contact realized in the classroom.

Community-Centered blogging includes the critical social component of learning as depicted by Vygotsky’s notions of social cognition, Lipman’s community of inquiry, and Wenger's ideas of community practice. It expresses the importance of social and peer interaction as foci of the learning community. Instructors of courses rooted in a knowledge discipline can use blogs to lead students through the foundations of that discipline to cultivate real-world experiences. Students make an investment in what they post because they are able to advance their own perspectives and experiences (Exhibit 3). By reading and appraising what other students write, the individual student can add content by commenting on its value, relating its relevance to his or her own experience, and suggesting additional resources that further discussion. Since blogs are presented on Web pages, embedding links are appropriate and convenient, and make it easy for other students to access the new resources quickly. Instructors should be cognizant of the delicate balance that rests between the synchronicity of time and place in this environment and strive to keep discussions focused on the topic at hand.

Instructional blogging also captures the three instructional techniques described by Ruth Colvin-Clark and Richard Mayer in their book e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. These three techniques involve 1) receptive techniques, in which acquiring information involves building instructional modules that open avenues to greater amounts of information while limiting application and experimentation; 2) directive techniques, which emphasize frequent responses from learners with immediate feedback from the instructor; and 3) guided discovery techniques, which place the instructor in the role of the expert leading students toward solving real-life challenges and identifying the appropriate conceptual processes to support student knowledge acquisition. (Colvin-Clark and Mayer 2003)

Receptive: information acquisition

During fall semester 2003, a professor in the University of Arizona College of Education taught a 500 level course that studied the role of language in reading and writing processes. He used blogs for class assignments, reflections, and journal entries as a way to extend discussion and foster collaboration between their once-weekly meetings (see Exhibit 4 for an example). From this experience, he suggests that instructional blogging has great potential for making more of an integrated experience of the weekly graduate course. (Betts and Glogoff 2004, 4) He finds blogging conducive to framing assignments within a theoretical context from which students then acquire more information and report in their blogs on what they have learned. An example of using the information acquisition technique (Exhibit 5) from my own course also demonstrates how blogging fulfills this technique by framing an assignment within a theoretical context that leads students to acquire more information.

Directive: response strengthening

An English professor teaching freshman composition created a blog for each student in his two English 101 sections during fall semester 2003 and spring semester 2005. In addition he used a separate blog (Exhibit 6) (Endres 2003) to post summaries of important classroom discussions, to reinforce key learnings that he taught that week, and to clarify points that students had struggled to understand fully. By using a blog to do this, he provided equal access to the information for all students and articulated those points he deemed most appropriate.

Blogs also lend themselves extremely well to response strengthening because of the comments form attached to each entry. Faculty can expand a student’s understanding by adding specific content through the comments form and can also direct the student to explore additional material. For the assignment on disruptive technologies in Decision Making for Information Professionals, I posted the following comment to one student’s entry. “I agree with the idea that file sharing can be seen as a disruptive technology. At the heart of the disruption you are writing about, IMO [in my opinion], is P2P. Are you familiar with it?” In this case, the student revisited the topic, found additional information and posted an insightful entry regarding peer-to-peer file sharing and university policy changes. Most of the assignments given in my class lend themselves well to response strengthening because I take the opportunity to give direct feedback via the comments form. Given the public nature of blog pages, critical comments are best given in email messages in virtual courses and face-to-face or by email in hybrid classes.

Guided Discovery: Knowledge Construction

In a module on information architecture, students read from the professional literature and visited Web sites providing tutorials and other content. They were then given an assignment that asked them to synthesize what they learned and to describe it in a real-world situation (Exhibit 7). Using the guided discovery technique also opens options for collaboration because students work together to build knowledge. It embraces the concept of cognitive scaffolding, a basic tenet of constructivism, because students revisit the learning space, build upon prior knowledge, think about what they have learned, and drill deeper for more information. (Richards 2001) Finally, the capability for each student to add substantive comments to other students’ blog entries adds an additional tier of interactivity and social interaction. In online courses where communication remains largely text-based, this opportunity to enhance community can make significant contributions to student learning.

Observations

Blogging can complement community building in hybrid and distance courses and has been found compatible with the notion of building personal places in virtual spaces. Brookfield and Preskill (1995) address the value of promoting discussion in the classroom and iterative techniques that instructors may apply to bring forward more meaningful discussions among their students. Successfully promoting discussion in virtual courses, however, can be challenging due to the capability of virtual students to lurk rather than participate. Anderson reports that in online teaching, it is much easier to be exclusive and allow non-participants to lurk at the edges without active community involvement. (2004, 241) My own experience adds testimony to this. As an adjunct professor, I have taught a course on information technology nearly each summer since 1994 for the School of Information Resources and Library Science. I conducted the course as a hybrid between 1994 and 2000 and during these years made extensive use of virtual instructional tools to complement classroom meetings. In 2003 I began teaching it fully online.

One aspect that I was quite pleased with during the hybrid years was that all but the most introverted students fully participated in online forum discussions. In fact, one of the most impressive aspects of the 2000 hybrid class was that students regularly took their assignments beyond the basic requirement. Typically, they shared additional resources with classmates and some even challenged others to build upon what they reported. The summer that the course became fully online a blog was added to provide a common space to explore individual student findings related to one of the course’s main themes – recognizing and explaining real-world uses for new technologies. Students were asked to share new learnings with other students, read each other’s entries, and use the blog’s comments feature to add new content. Those students who found the course’s subject engaging posted entries regularly while others refused to do so, even though posting was a course requirement. No matter what incentives I tried, I could not lure the lurkers into participating in meaningful ways in the discussion forums or the blogs. The primary difference was the absence of face-to-face discussions where I could call on students and lead them through a knowledge construction process resulting in their ownership of an idea.

In my 2004 course offering, I created a blog for each student and developed assignments that they were required to post on their blogs. Furthermore, students were required to read each other’s entries and make three substantive comments per week. Requiring comments assures participation but is also crucial to validating the student’s contributions. From assessment data collected at the end of the 2003 class I learned that the students who posted regularly to the topical blog were disappointed that other students were not commenting on their entries. At the beginning of the 2004 class, I surveyed the students about their experience blogging. Several students echoed the disappointment expressed by students in my previous class. In a different course taken the previous semester, the professor asked them to start a blog but posting entries was not required and the professor did not comment on their first week’s entries. Due to this lack of attention, students abandoned maintaining their blogs. In my 2004 course, I observed more participation than in the previous year’s class and students reported that blogging promoted a greater sense of community. Overall, student satisfaction with using blogs in this course was high and there is evidence that the peer review capabilities contributed to better understandings of content. (see student survey responses in Exhibits 8, 9, and 10).

Conclusions

Instructional blogging is a valuable elearning tool that can be used in a number of different ways to engage students in discussion, exploration, and discovery. It is appropriate for both hybrid and fully online courses and its uses are consistent with the concepts in sociocultural and constructivist theory. As my institution's primary support person for instructional blogging, as well as one who has integrated blogging into his instruction, I can attest that it works best when integrated into one pedagogy, vested in an appropriate educational theory, and updated regularly by participants. As more instructors use blogging, we will have the opportunity to assess new and additional uses. It will be interesting, for example, to learn if blogs promote virtual communities after the class is over and grades have been assigned. Extending contact between an instructor and enthusiastic students through a topical blog could prove to be a practical way to mentor students and attract the best to continue their studies in that discipline.

References

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Endres, W, 2003. Classes of Oct. 16. Blog entry. October 16. <http://blog.ltc.arizona.edu/billendres/archives/000594.html> last accessed July 27, 2004.

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