Day 4 – Concerns with blogging: a student perspective
This week’s great outlined the opportunities for blogging very well and brought up some great points within each section of the page. My experience with blogging began very recently with the start of this course in September. Prior to this class I had never participated in blogging for personal or academic purposes.
Regarding my own experience and as pointed out in Day 4’s section, blogging can be very time consuming especially when this is familiar territory. Fulfilling the requirements of a good, constructive post I think takes alot of time, especially when it involves embedding images, videos or another other multimedia that may add to a post. This is even more taxing when you have little to no prior knowledge on how to navigate a blog and fully utilize all that it has to offer.
As pointed out in Day 1 “blogs are a new form of media literacy” (Davies in http://etec522blogs.wordpress.com/what-is-blogging/, 2011). Literacy learning is a process and just as developing critical reading and writing skills takes time and involves various components so does critical blogging. While crictical writing and reading skills are transferable in the sense that students are able to use these when writing/reading a post a new technological component/skill is required to develop these skills within this new literacy.
Being able link to relevant articles and websites, write about them, consider them and connect them all become as important as in report or essay writing with a tech twist. Linking to more than one external site in one entry also becomes an important function of good blogging and connects separate things with a personal perspective. However, student blog usage will not increase learning without appropriate content, scaffolding and strategies (Top, Yukselturk, Inan, 2010). These new skills will have to be developed for students to blog effectively and while I have never used blogging as an educator I do believe that we must then have some prior development of these “critical blogging skills” as well as the basics of navigating a blog and I’m sure many teachers are aware of and doing this.
Top, Yuselturk and Inan (2010) noted that future research of blogging might also investigate blogging in teacher education courses so that teachers’ attitudes, and beliefs are also considered “…to improve generalizability of the study and future research should include large number of preservice teachers from diverse subject areas”. Blogging then becomes important in education from both spectrums student learning and teacher learning as the former becomes dependent on the latter.
This group has done a good job in showing what then needs to be incorporated into the learning process of blogging and its use as a new literacy. What we must also be mindful of as educators is that students encompass many different learning styles and some may take to blogging as a learning tool more than others.
Davie, A. in What is Blogging, 2011. Retrieved from http://etec522blogs.wordpress.com/what-is-blogging/
Top, E. Yukselturk, E. and Inan, F. (2010). Reconsidering usage of blogging in preservice teacher education courses. The internet and Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751610000503
Posted in: Week 07: Blogs