EduBlog Insights

He investigated the use of notebook and filter blogs in undergraduate courses with a focus on how journalism students learn to create blogs and how blogs can help students learn about such journalism topics as online newspaper design and current events reporting. He used a qualitative research design known as ethnographic educational evaluation. The project ran form October 2003 to April 2004. Participants were undergraduates in two online journalism classes at a university in the Rocky Mountain region. The investigation included interviews, observations and documents.

He explored three major themes: the technical aspects of creating a blog, communication (with instructor and with other students), and students finding their voice in writing blogs.

The notebook blogs were used by the students when viewing other students presentations on a topic dealing with online mass media. The entries were to include a summary of the topic, the student’s reactions about what they learned. Even though the web sites were posted on the class home page so any student could view another student’s page, the author said he saw little interaction. Very few criticized each other. The author felt this was because other students could view their comments.

The filter blog was accomplished through six teams of four students each creating a blog. This blog had links to 4 different types of web site: informative, self-expressive, persuasive, and entertaiment. Each student on a team was to comment and evaluate the four types of sites, resulting in conversation among them. The author tells about management problems and how he worked through them. With his second group, he gave students two choices of content for their filter blogs: a web critique or a current events blog. He gave more specific directions, such as comments that say ‘This is good’ or ‘This bites’ would not be sufficient. The critique would need references to at least two Web design sources other than the textbook. You can view these blogs at:

www.uwyo.edu/cmjr/wiltse/3530/blogproject.htm

The author concludes with recommendations:

1. Detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to set up blogs to avoid many of the technical problems. More testing of free sites by the instructor would help.

2. Concern over the casual writing style led the author to state that journalists who blog should uphold journalistic writing standards. At the same time, he felt that some creative writing should exist as some students thrived in the type of freedom that blog writing can provide. Instructors should provide models of different types of good blogging.

3. Blogs should be public, not private to make students aware that they are writing for a potential audience.

4. Sudents with weak writing skills should write first in a word-processing program and run spell and grammar checks and then copy-and-paste entries.

5. Assessing and grading the blogs is anothe issue. The author thought his laissez faire attitude may have led to the informal writing during the first year of blogging for his classes. Students wanted more instructor feedback. Perhaps student blog wiritng could be evaluaed several times during the semester rather than just at the end. More self-assessment and setting goals to improve could be used. Instructors could assign a grade for grammar and another grade for style or use a rubric to evaluate log contnent and thoughfulness of their comments.

The author wrote more observations and plans to continue using blog projects in his classes. Many of the things this author mentions, we have already discussed. We still have lots to sift through and lean about how to use weblogs effectively in our classes. It is good to see this type of research coming forward. There is much to think about and the author’s final paragraph states:

I think blog assignments could be adopted for any class that involves a writing component. The immediacy of publishing one’s writing and the possibility of a reader anywhere in the world commenting on that writing makes blogs powerful learning tools.

I’d like to go one step further and require that all classes require a writing component.  And of course, blogging would be a great way to implement this!