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Effective Teaching Using Collaborative Learning Strategies 2005-2006
Faculty of Community Services Initiatives

EduBlogging: Critical Reflective Narrative Learning Tools and Developing Pedagogically Appropriate Blogging Environments

By Dr. Jason Nolan, School of Early Childhood Education, Ryerson University. 2007

Bloggers have been characterized as everything from navel-gazing diarists to the latest and most provocative members of the free press (Cooper, 2001; Levine, 2003; Nolan, 2003; Oravec, 2002). However, educators from around the world have seen the potential of blogging to improve the quality of the educational experience, and have adopted blogging as a critical teaching and learning tool. Blogs are flexible, versatile, accessible, and have a tendency to foster community and communication; all qualities that lend themselves to effective classroom use. Educators see blogging as complimentary to traditional forms of learning; offering new possibilities for writing, as well as interaction with course materials and the learning community (Halavais, 2006). With the goal of increasing student engagement and interaction, and fostering critical self-reflection, blogging has become relatively common in classrooms. However though there are a plethora of blogging platforms available, none have been designed for educational use.

There has been decades of research into learning with computers and digital technology that has tested the effectiveness of a myriad of tools and technologies and techniques on learner from K-12 and beyond (Harasim et al., 1995; Harasim 2006; Cummins and Sayers, 1995). Some tools were developed in the lab, but most built upon technologies first found in social use that were later adapted for use in education. Blogging is nothing new in this regard, and more recently podcasting, friendster (Facebook) and the like have started appearing in the classroom and lecture hall. We had been working collaborative virtual learning environments called MOOs for a number of years (Curtis, 1993; Curtis and Nichols, 1993; Davie et al., 1999; Davie and Nolan, 1999; Turkle, 1995), and saw blogging as a natural fit as an writing tool that would compliment the social constructivist nature of MOOs, and mitigate some of the frustrations students had with online courseware and learning tools (Nara  and Kling 1999; Oravec, 2002; Vygotsky, 1980; Young, 2002).

Starting in late 2001, blogs were already finding their way into university classrooms, and at the University of Toronto the Edublog project was initiated to explore how blogging might find a formal place as a critical thinking tool for undergraduate science education. This work builds on ongoing inquiry into the pedagogy of cyberspace, drawing heavily on previous work into social constructionist virtual learning communities at the university and elsewhere (Cicognani, 1998; Davie et al., 1999; Nolan and Weiss, 2002; Turkle, 1995). There were some key issues to be explored beyond the obvious issues: governmentality, pedagogy of technology, and how virtual communities functioned (Rheingold, 1993; Collins and Berge, 1997; Fernback and Thompson, 1999, Foucault, 1991). The first was the need to be able to document formative evaluative comments, both private and visible, in a manner that would not disrupt the flow of writing and comments. The second is the need to extract both these comments, as well as statistical information regarding each student's writing and commenting. Both are required to enable an educator to get a complete picture of student participation and engagement. These background tools represent the kinds of tools we need to develop for educators in order for them to actively participate in online environments without succumbing to overload and burnout.

More recently, we have begun to work collaboratively across disciplines and institutions, bringing together ideas from educational theory and drawing on our own experiences in an effort to establish a set of best practices for blogging in the classroom. In this paper, we will describe our inquiry into the use of blogs as learning environments in higher education.  We will report the outcomes of our own work with blogs in our classrooms, detail the pros and cons of traditional blogging software, and provide a roadmap for designing and building a blogging platform specifically created for use in higher education.

Blogs were first used at the University of Toronto in 2001at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and later at the Knowledge Media Design Institute where graduate students reflected critically on readings and discussions to facilitate the co-construction of knowledge. In 2005, work began on EduBlogger, a project to create a blogging platform that meets higher education’s needs, by providing avenues for students to become engaged with course work, foster collaboration and the co-construction of knowledge, and increase the quality of writing.

At Ryerson University’s School of Early Childhood Education, the approach is to engage the notion of teacher professionalization, and develop critical reflective narrative skills. Students are encouraged to situate their discourse and writing as 'public utterances', seeing themselves as not just personal meaning makers, but as working towards maintaining a public professional voice as educators. The impact that this approach has centred on notions of public and private voice, the need for the instructor to be able to make personal comments to students that do not become part of the public record, and a need for the student to be able to have some control over the context into which her ideas are constructed.

Our inquiry is action research in nature, completing cycles of implementation in classroom and online settings. We have experimented with a variety of platforms, pedagogical techniques and learning settings in order to get a more complete sense of what elements would be required for a full-fledged tool to meet the needs of educators and learners. We consult with faculty and students from multiple disciplines about their experiences using blogging in a classroom context. We are now at the point of visualizing the necessary tools to meet the demonstrated needs. With the deployment of our two test bed platforms, we are ready to assess the validity of our assumptions during the fall and winter of 2006-2007. Our results will be reported anecdotally, with accounts from educators on their perception of student experience as a preliminary assessment, and our report will form the foundation of more formal field testing at a larger number of institutions in the fall of 2007. The larger project will include formal evaluative protocols including the evaluation of student experience of engagement by means of questionnaires and interviews.

The results of our implementation, design and deployment will be useful to researchers and educators interested in large scale courseware initiatives as well as the application and relocalization of existing technologies into learning environments. We anticipate the efficacy of evaluation tools, as an adjunct to more traditional methods of evaluation will result in greater efficiency in terms of the evaluative process.

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