Blogging and Pedagogy

I started this post a while ago and never got back to it... It's been sitting in draft mode for a while, and now I've forgotten what else I wanted to say :-). Oh well, here's the post as I left it. Just some thoughts on blogging in the classroom:

Aaron Campbell provides
a thoughtful post about using Weblogs in the classroom in response to a talk from James Farmer.

In his talk Farmer points out an important difference between a blog and a discussion board in an LMS like Blackboard:

"(The LMS)...environment is controlled entirely from above. People go to the source, where they then request a discussion board, which they then put onto students, and so on. It's extremely centralized. However, in a weblog environment, then, it is the actual students and the teachers who are participating, if you will, the 'small pieces' that make up the whole...in a loosely joined way. And this is a very, very significant difference to me. The first environment is centered around the organization, centered around the system; and the second is centered around the individual. And in my opinion, to have a successful communication environment, a successful online environment, one which is motivating, one where networks can form, one where people can communicate easily with each other, it has to be centered around their presence as individuals. And I think weblogs and aggregators can do this."

Campbell goes on to note that students will also have to be trained how to interact in this kind of environment because they are not used to a "learning-centered" approach. They expect a "teacher-centered" environment and "Confusion and anxiety is bound to ensue."

I think all of these points are true and pretty much right. I wonder, though, if students can go too far in the other direction -- I think there's a real danger that they become so "learner-centered" and concerned about their "presence as individuals" that they ignore the other learners around them. Farmer does say this in his presentation, but I'd like to underscore it. It's not enough for students simply to assert their individuality through blogging, they also need to use that individuality... their virtual persona, if you will... as a basis to communicate with others in the class.

Though almost all blogs have a commenting feature, I have to admit that dialogue is easier in a discussion board on a CMS, because you only have to go to one place to see what people are talking about. If everyone in a class has a blog, that's 15-20 different places that a discussion can occur in. Farmer sees aggregators in the class as the cure for this problem -- a way to collect all of the posts in one place (either in their own software or on a class web page that aggregates posts). But that's still a pretty loose form of communication. Barbara Ganley's use of a "Collaborative Mother Blog" like this one seems to be the real way around this problem. Let students all have their own blogs, but also be sure to provide a central place that everyone checks and communicates in reglularly.