Benefits of Blogging in Education
Over the next several years
blogging continued to become increasingly popular with the general population
and increasingly more prevalent in education. Higher educational institutions
still dominated the blogosphere, however more and more educators were encouraging
and experimenting with blogging with younger and younger age groups. Many ‘shout
from the rooftops’ of the benefits of blogging and the need to bring this
pedagogical tool to the masses.
In their 2012 paper, The Transformative Potential of Blogs for
Research in Higher Education, Jana Bouwma-Gearhart and James Bess point out
that while the blog is still in its relative infancy with respect to its use
for academic research and may have important limitations, such as inviting
contestations for authorship or ownership of ideas, it offers great promise for
richer collaboration among many informed and interested scholars. The use of
the blog for communication of in-process research and ideas may constitute not
only an improvement in academic productivity but a significant transformation
of the very culture of academic research in other positive respects (p. 250).
At the
university level, blogging has proven its effectiveness with students as a
learning tool. In is 2012 article, Hub-and
Spoke Student Blogging and Advantages for Classroom Discussion, Todd
Walatka investigates the use of blogging as a pedagogical approach. He points
out that ‘student-active strategies’ are widely accepted in educational
research and that blogging can fulfill two general pedagogical principles.
First, learning results from what the students does and thinks and that a focus
on what the student does (or what one hopes students will be able to do) should
guide course structure, assignments, assessments, and pedagogical strategies.
Second, that new knowledge is constructed upon existing knowledge and thus
teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false
beliefs, and the naïve renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to
a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help
each student achieve a more mature understanding. The heart of this approach is
the principle of “Just-in-Time-Teaching”. The main blogging approach used by
Walatka is the hub-and-spoke method. In this approach, the professor maintains
a central course blog (the “hub”) with links to each student’s blog (the
“spokes”). This provides both a central location for distributing course
information and assignments and individual spaces for each student to reflect
on and begin a conversation about the course material.
Walatka
(2012) acknowledges that one of the central aims of education today is to help
students to think critically and express themselves clearly and persuasively.
This demands giving students the time and space in which to truly engage the
material in dialogue with others. Blogging is a particularly helpful tool in
this process. Writing assignments give students the opportunity to explore new
ideas and begin engaging with one another. Student development is further
supported as the instructor is able to tailor a particular class to the current
level of understanding among students. Finally, by integrating student
reflections as a fundamental part of in-class time the professor both begins
where the students are and provides a space in which their own contributions
are the core material from which the class builds. With the public nature of
blogging one can also effectively draw more students into discussion in the
classroom, affirming their essential role in the learning process.
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