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.
