☼ Using Blogs for Educational Purposes ☼

Descriptive Reflection

on the web article “7 Things You Should Know About Blogs” from www.educause.edu/eli/ August 2005

Blogs are personal online journals that serve to capture thoughts and comments, and post them to a public website for others to read and respond. It is quick and simple to create an entry.

1. What is it?

A blog, according to www.educause.edu – is a shorthand term that means “Web log” – is an online, chronological collection of personal commentary and links. Blogs present an alternative to mainstream media publications, the may lead to discourse between bloggers and generate a strong sense of community.

2. Who’s doing it?

Today, 1000 people use these services. Blogs are showing up in venues ranging from entertainmentand commerce to news and politics. there are group blogs, family blogs, community blogs, and corporate blogs. Students are increasingly using blogs both as personal commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.

3. How does it work?

It can be thought of as a simple online journal. Bloggers enter posts into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, then you proceed to save the post. The content will be available online when the application adds the entry to the blog, user’s who have subscribed to that blog’s content will be alerted.

Readers can provide feedback by leaving comments on the same blog page or by posting a response on thier own blogs and linking back to the original post – called trackback.

Critical Reflection

4. Why is it significant?

Blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, reflection, and debate. They attract large and dedicated reading. Blogs are becoming an important component of the internet which foster the growth of communities and may provide new ways to evaluate and critique student-created knowledge.

Anita Campbell provides us with good insight on the good and the bad about blogging.

The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means that open discussions can be stablished almost immediately.

5. What are the downsides?

Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individuals, they can include biased or innaccurate information. Blogs offer individuals the opportunity to express themselves through their oppinions, ideas and attitudes; which could be acceptable for a personal blog. But when we refer to blogs hosted on an institutional server for example, this may be inapropriate.

6. Where is it going?

As blogs are easy to modify and create, they are promoting high discussions and fostering great interest.

As creators of the article from www.educause.edu/eli/ affirm, Blogs may serve as an educational tool for reflection, knowledge building, and sharing. “Blogs continue to benefit from several years of experimentation and evolution, both within and outside of education”.

If as educators, we carefully evaluate strengths and weaknesses; we will then be learning to set guidelines and expectations to maximise the benefit of blogs to students.

7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Blogs can be used for reflection in lessons or even current topics. According to www.educarse.edu/eli/ “blogs offer students and staff a high level of autonomy while creating a new opportunity for interaction with peers. Blogs provide discussions that go beyond the inclussion of culture, politics, and other areas”. Also, students often learn as much each other as from teachers or other relevant texts, and blogs offer another way for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Why should we use blogs?

• They offer our students opportunities for collaborative writing
• Reflective, knowledge and/or learning journals provide ways of teaching and learning
• Critique of creative writing piece
• Assessment responses
• Directed Writing exercises
• Allows students to practice the writing of logs
• Personal diary of events
• General class information sites

Educational Uses for Weblogs (Paul Holland, 2005)

The key idea is to create critical conversation and connections in the learning experience. Weblogs enable more than just a personal writing space, but they invite users to participate in a larger community, to take their place in the information ecology, to learn how to participate in and perform (not just learn about):

• Critical thinking
• Creating a narrative
• Formal and informal discourse
• Research and attribution
• Linking
• Writing for others
• Taking creative risks
• Collaborating
• Participating in a variety of conversations

Why Social Networks are Good for the Kids

by Sarah Lacy on February 24, 2009

Sarah Lacy, on her article “Why Social Networks are Good for the Kids”, makes reference to the interview of neuroscientist Lady Greenfield on social networks, the impact of spending hours in front of the computer and what makes a friend. Greenfield warns social networking sites are changing children’s brains, resulting in selfish and attention deficient young people. Her interview follows

\’Environment influences connections in brain\’

It is only after reading about Greenfield’s topic of interest and after listening to her interview that Lacy’s reading comes together in a more meaningful way. There are a few points to be considered here in general, these are:

• Sarah Lacy dissagrees with Greenfield’s assumption that social networking is devoid of a “cohesive narrative and long-term significance”.
• Lacy adds that Facebook and Twitter are a means to extending ones real identity and relationships online; which is why Lacy believes makes them so addictive. “These sites have made my real human relationships longer lasting and more substantive” (Lacy, 2009).
• There is a concern I share with both authors: Sarah Lacy and Lady Greenfield, and that is that over saturation online leads to a lack of empathy, as well as ‘real world pressures’.
• These issue reminds me of people’s fears that television was going to turn each generation into mindless zombies, a fear which seems to grow with each generation regardless of the fact that the current one turned out ok. And so, it is assummed that these children will be somehow without any social interactions somehow, when surely they will be interacting with their peers and teachers every day at school and with their familes and friends at home for a greater ammount of time in a day than could be spent on the computer.
• Greenfield’s article and interview makes me wonder on what exactly is she basing her arguments on? Nowhere in the article does it mention what research she did (if any). The whole thing is “She said that…”, “She warned that…” “She fears…” After having read and analysed these material, the fist question I informally asked myself was: what kind of a “scientist” is she?

Reference

“7 Things You Should Know About … Blogs” (2005) Retrieved March 10, 2009 from http://www.educause.edu/eli/

Holland, P. (2005). Educational Uses for Weblogs.

Lacy, S. (2009). Why Social Networks are Good fot the Kids. Retrieved March 9, 2009, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/24/why-social-networks-are-good-for-the-kids/

The State of Queensland – Department of Education and Training. (2008). About Blogs. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://education.qld.gov.au/learningplace/communication/blogs/aboutblogs.html

Wintour, P. (2009) Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

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