Reflective Blogs: Redux

This morning's session at the Spotlight on Teaching and Learning went really well I thought. I was a bit apprehensive that I was going to be offering my own humble perspective on how blogs can be mobilised for student assessment. More particularly, I could not offer any information on how this would work from an academic perspective. It turned out that with the other two presentations - Fostering Learner Engagement and Cultural Understanding Through Foreign Language Blogging, Antoine Alm (Languages and Cultures, University of Otago), and The Use of a Blog as the Medium for Online Role Plays in Nutrition in Post Graduate Study, Megan Gibbons (Midwifery and Otago Institute of Sport and Adventure, Otago Polytechnic) and Sandra Elias (Midwifery, Otago Polytechnic) - my presentation actually provided a point of contrast in that it provided feedback on how learners view this experience. In this post, I will elaborate on my previous post - my presentation - and augment it with the points I raised that were not outlined in that post as well as the discussion that followed my presentation.

Further Points:

• Blogs have the potential to let students be much more honest. I know that I am much more my-self on-line than off. Posting in a blog means we do not have to worry about how people are actually viewing us.
• Blogs allow us to develop a portfolio which we can later use for things such as funding applications and for admission to certain academic programmes.
• A blog is much quicker to maintain than a manual journal.
  

Discussion Points:

• A blog can provide documentation of practice which a practice researcher can later use when they draft their contextualising document.
• Blogs provide the option to post comments. Although this could be a reasonably rare occurrence - at least it was in two instances of blogs used for assessment today - the option is still there. It is better, in my view, to provide this option rather than not. Even if students don't take it up at least there is the availability for them to comment.
• Blogs are much more customisable than discussion boards - particularly Blackboard. A blog becomes a student's own space. Although this can have a down-side in that a lot of time can be spent getting the look of a blog the way a student wants and this can distract from other studies.
• There are privacy issues with a blog. If you are going to blog about problems you encountered then you need to do so in a way that the person with whom you are having the problem cannot be publicly identified. Having said this, I found blogging about the problem let me focus on ways to solve it rather than letting me simply do my old trick of running away and hiding. Of course, there is also the phenomenon that a blog can be a more neutral way to resolve conflict: instead of confronting someone - which may exacerbate the problem - they may read your post and this may guide them in their own endeavours.

I found this session rather invigorating. I was also pleased to see academics talking about the successes they had with their assessments. It seemed a very positive step forward in mobilising this tool for educational purposes.