Saturday, November 24, 2012

All Hail the Blogger (Blogging in Education: The Early Years)




Blogging in Education: The Early Years

By 2004, blogging had become firmly established as a web based communication tool. The blogging phenomenon evolved from its early origins as a medium for the publication of simple, online personal diaries, to an app that has the capacity to engage people in collaborative activity, knowledge sharing, reflection, and debate (Williams and Jacobs, 2004, page 232). Many people called 2004 the Year of the Blog. A report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project supported this claim. In 2004, not only did the number of blog creators sharply increase, but more importantly blog readership. By the end of the year about 8 million Americans had created a blog and approximately 32 million Americans were blog readers (McGann, 2005). As the popularity of blogging increased, so did the attention it was given by those in the field of education.
In their 2004 article, Content Delivery in the ‘Blogosphere’, Richard Ferdig and Kaye Trammell recognize that “while few educators have already started using blogs in the classroom, more have focused on the potential of blogging in teaching and learning” (p. 12). As obvious supporters of blogging in education, Ferdig and Kaye draw on their own research and teaching to describe the pedagogy behind blogs, why blogs should be used as one of many teaching and learning tools, the potential benefits of blogs for educators, and specific strategies for using blogs in the classroom.
            In 2004, the average blogger was male, under 30, been online six or more years, with a household income around $50,000 annually, and had a college or graduate degree (McGann, 2005). This was far from describing the average student, or even teacher. However, because the potential benefits of blogging were too strong to ignore, researchers and educators started looking more closely at engaging specific populations in this web based activity. Initially, much of the early ‘push’ toward blogging and blogging research was focused on institutions of higher education. In their 2004 paper, Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector, Jeremy Williams and Joanne Jacobs explored the methods for using blogs for educational purposes in university courses and recorded the experiences of the Brisbane Graduate School of Business with its ‘MBA blog’.
            By 2006, a growing body of research was building around blogging, so much so that researchers were better able to review and find trends in works already created and also to find new, more focused areas of researcher to pursue in the future. In a review of literature available at the time, Marcus O’Donnell (2006) points out that much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in higher education focused on evaluation of blogging as a communicative technique. O’Donnell contends that this type of discussion largely assumes that successful integration of blogging into course delivery should be judged against a pre-existing and unchallenged pedagogical model. In his paper, Blogging as Pedagogic Practice: Artefact and Ecology, O’Donnell argues that to leverage its full educational potential blogging must be understood not just as an isolated phenomena, but as part of a broad palette of cybercultural practices which provide us with new ways of doing and thinking. O’Donnell points out that a model of blogging as a networked approach to learning suggests that blogging might achieve best results across the curriculum not through isolated use in individual units (p. 5). 
At this time, not only was blogging being researched and encouraged at higher education institutions, it was also being looked at in the K-12 and distance learning systems. Yoany Beldarrain, explored the growing use of blogging and other interactive and collaborative tools in her (2006) article, Distance Education Trend: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration. Beldarrain points out that technology is responsible for distorting the concept of distance between learner and instructor, and enabling learners to access education at any time and from any place (p. 139) Blogs are a very effective tool in achieving this goal. Beldarrain notes that blogs can be student-controlled while others are instructor-managed. For distance educators, the blog is a repository of professional resources and information related to online collaborative learning (p. 141).
Along with a greater variety of populations, published experiences with blogging also became more varied and personal. In 2005, Miles Berry decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon and wrote about his experiences blogging with his Year 6 students (11 – 12 year olds) in his article Elgg and Blogging in primary education. Likewise, after he discovered blogging as a new tool with unlimited possibilities for two-way connection with his community, Superintendent Mark Stock wrote about his experiences with blogging (2006). Both Berry and Stock, in describing their experiences, give advice about blogging, including listing benefits and pitfalls.

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