Blogs: The New University Workspace?

One of the topics that I’m most interested in is the potential of blogs to form part of (or, indeed, all of) personal ePortfolios for students.  As the face to face panel which parallels this blog is taking place on Monday, I thought I’d take the opportunity to return to Chantal Bourgault’s comments on this blog’s very first post:

My interest was piqued by the question in this welcoming post about whether blogs might be used as part of students’ ePortfolios, because much of my current teaching and research centres around the transition from study to employment.

Especially in my field of media and communication, portfolios are already important, since graduating students frequently need to be able to demonstrate skills in digital media in order to gain employment. But often – and especially in the media industries – students also need to be able to creatively ‘package’ their work and even their worldview or identity in a way that ‘sells’ them as a potential employee or start-up company or grant applicant. In the media world, that capacity to project an identity or personal ‘brand’ is often central to gaining (or creating one’s own) work.

It seems to me that blogging is a terrific way to practice that skill, and to assemble a suite of materials that communicate the kind of work a graduate can and wants to do in a way that is more personal, immediate and engaging than a traditional job application. Certainly, a combination of networking (including work experience) and portfolio work is most likely to gain a graduate employment in those sectors of the media and communications industry that are engaged in the creative work of content development.

So I’ll definitely be looking at incorporating some blogging into next year’s version of my ‘industry link’ unit in Communication Studies, using the blog of local designer and creative consultant Nat Brunovs as an example of the ways in which blogging can be used to gain and pursue satisfying work. See http://journals.concrete.org.au/nat/

This is quite a different model of blogging to the tutorial blogs I mentioned previously, but I suspect that the individual student blogs, which can be more readily shaped as personal ePortfolios, are closer to the form blogging takes for most other people.  Chantal mentioned one local example, but another example in a more prominent academic setting is the by the head of MIT Comparative Media Studies: Henry Jenkins’ blog.  While Jenkins is a highly respected name in pretty much all media-related academic fields, his blog combines academic, industry and personal insights seamlessly.

Since part of this blog’s function is not just to advocate, but also scrutinise the potential of blogs, I thought I’d end by pointing to Helen Barrett’s post ‘Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools’.  In her post, Barrett demonstrates 26 different tools which could be used to present an ePortfolio.  That leaves me wondering, in which cases would blogs be the best tool?

There’s been a fair bit of conversation thus far about blogs in the abstract and blogs at other universities, but I thought it was an opportune time to mention a few instances of courses in which blogging has already played a substantial part at UWA. To the best of my knowledge, the first UWA course to use blogs as part of both its means of communication and assessment was Self.Net: Communicating Identity in the Digital Age which I ran in the second semester of 2004. As Self.Net was (and still is) thematically about communication in the digital age (which, of course, is a provocative periodisation in itself) a mixed-mode course seemed the best strategy, which incorporated the face to face aspects of lectures, tutorials and workshops alongside alternate online workshops, tutorial comments in blogs, and a ‘webliography’ (a bibliography of online sources) which students were required to post online to a tutorial blog. In 2004 there were six tutorials, and each had its own course blog (with tute sizes ranging from 12 to 16, from memory).

In order to point out a few aspects of the blog, let me take the example of blog for my Monday, 2pm group from 2004. In the fourth week of semester - after the first three lectures, one of which was on blogging, and several workshops, including one in which students walked through the tutorial blogs and made their first post - each student in Self.Net was required to participate in their tutorial blog in particular ways. Beyond the first introductory post (which ensured they could log in, make a blog post, and find and create a link), other mandatory posts included:

• Each student elected one tutorial reading (out of two or three) to introduce in a given week. Before the tutorial in which they were asked to present a reading, students had to make a post (approximately 100-300 words long) outlining their take on the article, assessing its use, locating the main themes it talks about and picking out one or two key quotations. After the tutorial in which they presented a reading, using the ‘Comment’ button, they were asked to evaluate their previous post discussing how well their presentation fitted into the overall tutorial discussion, whether they thought anything should be added to their initial comments and how else the reading was discussed by their tutorial (100+ words). [Example 1, Example 2]
• The first written assignment was a Critical Annotated Webliography, analysing six to ten online sources in relation to their choice of four hypothetical essay questions (they never had to actually answer the hypothetical essay question, but the process of thinking through and critiquing relevant sources meant a lot of the brain-work was still done, anyway). This was handed in in hardcopy and posted, in full, to the course blog. [Example 1, Example 2]
• In the following week, each students had to post comments on two other people’s Critical Annotated Webliographies. Students’ comments were to examine how successful their peers’ Webliographies were and constructively criticise any areas which seemed lacking. [Example 1, Example 2]
• There were two online workshops which required posts to the course blog - one of ideas of race in online communication, and one of the politics of videogames. [Example 1, Example 2]
• Finally, during the last teaching week each student was asked make a reflective post evaluating the use of weblogs for learning purposes (did blogs work for them?), detail whether they believed themselves to be a cyborg (one of the course’s ongoing questions), and what they liked and/or disliked about the course in general (100+ words). [Example 1, Example 2]

As well as the mandatory posts, students were encouraged to make posts at least vaguely related to the course themes which they found interesting (although only a minority of students took up this opportunity). However, as the outlined structure and examples show, the blog ensured that conversations and thinking begun in face to face settings didn’t have to end there; likewise it was possible to begin tutorial thinking before the class actually began, with tutorial reading commentaries available in advance. On a similar level, asking students to post their Webliographies, and constructively critique each other, meant the learning process was transparent, and didn’t cease at the moment of submission, all amplified, too, by the power of peer learning, not just top-down marking. Finally, as course coordinator, the reflective posts were a great opportunity to examine whether students had managed to achieve their own student learning outcomes, as well as providing feedback for future course revisions (in the end, they were also extremely flattering to the course coordinator who may, from time to time, cite them elsewhere!).

At the end of October 2004, just as Self.Net was nearing its end, I gave a talk on ‘Blogging Universities’ at the ‘BlogNite’ symposium held at Curtin in which I emphasised a number of key advantages of using blogs in courses. The summary of which was:

• Blogs encourage peer-to-peer learning, allowing students to teach and learn from each other as well as the course tutors and lecturers.
• The publicly accessible nature of blogs forces students to consider the construction of their own public voice online, which often improves their writing.
• The always-available nature of blogs means posting to blogs can be done whenever it suits students’ schedules, thus creating a more flexible learning space.
• Since so many students already blog in some form or another, using blogs as learning tools forces them to reflect on their own online practices thus linking their personal and learning spaces in potentially very useful ways.

The full talk is still available online if you’d like more flesh to each of those points. I’ve also since thought further about the benefit of blogging being both a social and academic form, which you can read more about in my article ‘The Blogging of Everyday Life’ (Reconstruction, 6, 4, 2006) if you wish.

When Alison Bartlett was appointed as the Head of the Centre for Women’s Studies, Self.Net fell under her coordination. Alison might want to talk a little further about running the course and the experience of working the blogging students, but I thought I’d highlight the fact that the course has run a further three times thus far - once in Nedlands and twice in Hong Kong - and a similar (but slightly modified) blog format has been used each time: see an example of Self.Net - Hong Kong 2006; Self.Net - Nedlands Campus 2006 and Self.Net - Hong Kong 2007.

One point worth making is that the Self.Net blogs remain online and will do so indefinitely. They can, thus, be used as examples which students could cite in online portfolios or elsewhere. In pedagogical terms, this also keeps us as academics on our toes - knowing that students can see last years answers (and explicitly pointing this out to each successive group seems a better plan that wondering which students will stumble over the past versions) means we are forced to do the  right thing pedagogically and write new questions every year, not recycle old ones. In theory, this could also mean students each year could draw on the writing of previous cohorts to inform their own thinking, although in practice I’ve only seen minimal evidence of this.

While I think I’ve probably written a more than long enough post (!), I do just want to mention, quickly, one more robust blogging example, from a 2005 honours unit I ran called iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture. All the curriculum, assignments and extended seminar discussion (expanding from the 2 hour face to face sessions) was, and still is, online. Given that everything is there to been seen (as opposed to Self.Net which also uses WebCT to distribute copies of course outlines, handouts, and so forth), I’ll ask if people are interested, they take a look at the iGeneration blog and make comments or leave questions under this post. You might also be interested in comparing the 2005 version of iGeneration with the 2006 version run by Peter Morse.  In 2006 the assessment focused heavily on video-blogs or ‘vlogs’ while the 2005 version centred around audio production and podcasts.  (Peter, if you’re reading this blog, your comments and insights would be valuable, too!)

I’m coming from a student perspective, as someone who might, for example, be using a unit blog without maintaining it. Although the posts so far have focussed more on the place of blogging for academic staff, for students it also has the potential to be a particularly useful tool for both academic and more social, collaborative aspects of their units. Obviously, as with most ideas and grand notions surrounding blogging, and indeed with the use of new technologies in education, there is no guarantee that this potential will be realised; for one, demonstrating that blogs are relevant, critical to the unit, and encouraging students to engage with the site will determine how successful blogging can be in courses. As with any multimedia or computer-based project, student reactions and abilities may range from blogging novices to those who have spent years playing around with blogs, from computer illiterates to those who see the project more as a gimmick than an academic exercise. However, blogging does offer a great deal to units, for academic staff and for students, not just in submitting content to the site, but also through the participatory and community aspects to blogs.

There are a number of different sides to blogging mentioned in the other posts that are particularly relevant to students getting the most out of using blogs; certainly the public/private debate mentioned by first Mark Pegrum and then Alison Bartlett is especially pertinent, as students increasingly familiar with the internet, social networking sites such as MySpace, and writing for friends only (whether with actual privacy controls or just intended for a small group of people) enter the university system. This issue is something I’d like to cover in more detail in another post - given the different approaches provided by UWA to blogging, ranging from public and with no real subject focus featured in posts in cases such as the Node, run by Student Services, to the public, but slightly narrower in scope for both content and authors, blogs of the Graduate Research School’s MyResearchSpace, to private and relating to particular units in the case of the current Blog.Arts sites, there is scope for students to post very different content to blogs run by the university.

Despite the public/private discussion, I do feel that the very presence of an audience is one of the great aspects of blogs for student work. Regardless of whether it is a restricted group, such as the members of a tutorial, or potentially anyone browsing the internet, the fact remains that someone other than the tutor marking your work is able to read whatever you decide to post on the blog. While this can be daunting, particularly when you are not used to getting feedback from other people or are not confident in your own abilities, becoming comfortable with writing for an audience can be useful for improving study habits at undergrad level and be handy preparation for any further study, possibly leading into honours and postgrad courses.

However, one problem can be motivating, engaging, convincing students that blogging is relevant and useful. With the different functions and outcomes provided by blogs, they can be far more than just another web-based learning module. In supporting different types of content, as Tama Leaver pointed out, blogs give students the ability to work to their own strengths or interests without being restricted to pure text. Obviously, what students are able to do can be determined by the unit co-ordinator, but there is vast potential for projects or assignments to be more than a few hundred words (plus references) by each student on the same subject. Giving students the freedom to include images, video, audio, animation, interactivity, additional documents, links to other resources, dynamic data embedded within posts can allow them to extend themselves and submit a different kind of project, in content, tone, and presentation, to a research essay. Those students not confident or not as interested in writing as, for example, working with video, can then use additional materials in their work, all supported by the blogging infrastructure, and still with the same capacity for feedback from tutors, peers, and the community involved in that particular blog or network of blogs.

Personally, I find the potential of blogging, be it for academic, social, political, or personal purposes, to be extremely exciting, even if I’m far more enthustiastic about its capabilities than I should be! From a student perspective, good use of blogs - wherein there is a high level of engagement by both students and staff - for such purposes as assessments, discussions, organisation, hosting and cataloguing projects and their progress, or working on particular topics or outcomes, could well play an important role in students’ academic, and in some respects social, development. However, as has been mentioned in other posts, there are issues concerning student blogs, and considerations for staff and students to bear in mind when posting - particularly when being hosted on a UWA server and thus representing the university in image, if not in views - that should not be forgotten while imagining the potential of blogs.

Building on the arguments advanced by Tama Leaver, I’d like to suggest that when thinking about digital literacy, we can learn a great deal from work currently being carried out in the broader area of multiliteracies.

A lot of recent work in the field of literacy, particularly the New Literacy Studies, has seen a move away from the idea that Literacy is “a single thing with a big L and a single Y” (Brian Street, cited in Wilson 2000) and a realisation that it varies from context to context, giving rise to the notion of literacies. David Barton and Mary Hamilton (2000) have identified three ways in which the term has to be seen as plural: firstly, literacy practices may involve different media and semiotic systems (such as films or computers); secondly, “practices in different cultures and languages can be regarded as different literacies”; and thirdly, literacy practices may be associated with particular domains of life (such as academic or workplace literacy). While much of Barton and Hamilton’s work focuses on the third of these, the first two issues have been highlighted by the New London Group and others who reject traditional print-based literacy pedagogy with its focus on “formalised, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (New London Group, 2000). Instead, it is argued that there is a need for a pedagogy of multiliteracies which takes into account both “our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies” as well as “the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies”.

It’s also worth considering the work of Suresh Canagarajah (2003) who, taking a postmodern slant on the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), writes of “fluid literacies”:

[Our] students desire equal facility in English and their national languages. We cannot teach them English literacy without relevance to the other languages they use in their everyday life. (To do this, we don’t have to be proficient in those languages.) The reality of hybrid texts and fluid literacies increases the possibility that these languages will find equal yet mixed functionality in many contexts of postmodern communication. With the boundedness and self-confinement of the nation gradually eroding as the global seeps into the local, one might question whether we can have an exclusive “national” policy on anything anymore without being sensitive to the pressures and pulls of the international. Accommodating diverse languages/dialects in education is not a compassion we show for minority students; it is becoming a matter of economic necessity even for monolingual students from dominant social groups.

The value of this metaphor is in adding to the pluralisation already inherent in “literacies” the notion of fluidity, which suggests not only seepage across ever more permeable boundaries between nations, communities, languages and cultures, but the possibility of mixing and hybridisation.

What all of this work on multiliteracies suggests is that we need to conceive of a multilteracies paradigm which has at least two major strands: it is multimodal (including, for example, digital literacies) and is potentially also multilingual or at least multidialectal. There’s no doubt that the web is becoming more multilingual and multicultural than ever before; initiating students into web literacy may therefore involve not just the crossing of boundaries between modes of communication, but also a willingness to work across dialects and languages. That represents a significant challenge for educators.

References:

Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (2000) Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton and R. Ivanič (eds) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (pp.7-15). London: Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2003) Foreword. In G. Smitherman and V. Villanueva (eds) Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice (pp.ix-xiv). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
The New London Group. (2000) A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds) Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (pp.9-37). London: Routledge.
Wilson, A. (2000) There is no escape from third-space theory: Borderland discourse and the in-between literacies of prisons. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton and R. Ivanič (eds) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (pp.54-69). London: Routledge.

Does literacy in the twenty-first century now extend into the realm of digital literacy, including the ability to read and write on the World Wide Web?

The idea of literacy - being able to read, write, communicate, and comprehend - is at the very heart of learning and education. While there is a reasonable assumption that university students arrive literate in the classical sense, there is as well an expectation that the skills of literacy will improve and deepen with higher education. The digital era has added further complexity to the issue of literacy since the core skills needs to read, write and communicate are no longer (if they ever were) purely textual skills; rather being literate today often extends to the idea of digital literacy - being able to read, write and communicate across the world wide web and other digital arenas where communication isn’t just about crafting words, but also images, sounds, video and other multimedia forms. Moreover, literacies are increasingly about communicating with a larger (potential) audience, so not just thinking about one-to-one modes, but one-to-many communication more often than not.

Jill Walker, a prolific academic blogger from the University of Bergen, has written in a slightly different way about literacies in the web era, arguing that universities need to teach what she calls ‘network literacy’:

Most important, though, is the need to teach our students […] network literacy. We need to work out how we can teach writing in a distributed, collaborative environment, because this is the environment our students are going to live in. Network literacy means linking to what other people have written and inviting comments from others, it means understanding a kind of writing that is a social, collaborative process rather than an act of an individual in solitary. It means learning how to write with an awareness that anyone may read it: your mother, a future employer or the person whose work you’re writing about. [Jill Walker, ‘Weblogs: Learning in Public’, On the Horizon, 13, 2 (2005): 112-118]

From Jill’s writing, we’re left with a number of similar points to those already raised by Mark Pegrum: digital literacy is about getting comfortable writing for an audience (even a microcosm constituted by a tutorial group or class group), not just writing in a vacuum or a student-to-teacher (one-to-one) mode; and digital literacies are also about being able to incorporate more and more peer feedback and input, or writing collaboratively, not in isolation.

Blogs are a powerful arena for learning and teaching in part, at least, because they are a stable and recognisable form which encourages these sort of network literacies. I would argue, too, that blogs aren’t just about network literacies - although these aspects are extremely important. Rather, blogs are also key because their architecture increasingly is about mixing media forms other than text - be that image, sound, video (such as YouTube clips) or audio (such as mp3 files and podcasts). Henry Jenkins, the director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, has also written extensively on the idea of digital literacies and in a recent article (‘From YouTube to YouNiversity’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 24, Page B9) added these thoughts:

Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master’s degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program’s home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.

Blogging, following Henry Jenkins, can also be about building and deepening those networks of ideas and research which are what universities are (hopefully) best at. Ultimately, though, to make the point, I can’t just use words; instead I’d like to turn to this clip by Michael Wesch, as Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE" width="425" height="350"/]

Following the spirit of the argument, then: what do you think? Are blogs a key platform for developing digital literacy?

Hi everyone,

The question of whether blogs should be private (and accessible only to a pre-determined group of class peers) or public (and hence accessible across the entire web) is an important one.

The first thing to say, though, is that what’s crucial is the fact that students are writing, from the beginning, for a (semi-)public forum. Even if only class peers can read your blog, this is still very different from the lecturer being your sole reader. Given the larger size of the audience, you need to begin to develop a public persona which you project through your writing. As you are no longer directing your writing to a single individual, you need to carefully consider how to make your expression as clear as possible and your arguments as convincing as possible - to any and every potential reader.

The second important point is that there is the possibility - or even expectation - of feedback from more than one source. Yes, there will be comments from the lecturer, but peers and others can also comment. This can potentially lead to a rich exchange of views and perspectives, and to the co-construction of knowledge within the peer group. Much the same principle applies to asynchronous discussion boards of any kind and also to wikis. I’ve worked extensively with the former and feedback from students often focuses on the advantages of the exchange of views, particularly in multilingual, multicultural cohorts.

There are plenty of students blogging publicly, whether as part of courses or not. This can begin at quite low levels. In the area of language teaching, for example, there’s a lot of interest in getting students involved in writing public blogs, adding information on a regular basis as part of class assignments. For a list of good examples of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) blogs, see Dekita. The main advantage is seen as the fact that from the very start, the writing has a strong communicative purpose - it’s not just a classroom-based exercise.

It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing situation, though. Students could begin working on closed class blogs and, when they, the class and/or the teacher is/are ready, those blogs could be made public. There is a certain attraction in writing for an international audience … especially if and when feedback starts to come in from other corners of the globe.

It’s also not necesary for every student to have an individual blog. A class blog is one option which would take the heat off any individual, especially in the early days of publishing a public blog.

Another alternative might be to use wikis rather than blogs. Although they’re similar in many ways, wikis are in principle set up for collaboration from the very start. They are useful if the whole class is working on a single project, with each student or group of students working on one subsection. I recently taught a group of teachers in an e-learning unit on a Master’s course up in Hong Kong. Wikis were the most popular technology we covered and several teachers have since set one up and are actually using it with a current class. About half the teachers chose to keep their wikis private, while the others made them public. Among the public ones are a maths wiki and an American history wiki, which are well worth looking at to see how they’re running.

I’ll look forward to hearing other people’s views on this new technology which, it seems to me, has huge potential in education if harnessed well.

Mark

Should academics be using blogs to ensure students become familiar with writing and thinking in public, rather than just behind the closed doors of the physical (or electronic) classroom? Or are University blogs better kept behind password protection?

Does literacy in the twenty-first century now extend into the realm of digital literacy, including the ability to read and write on the World Wide Web?

Might blogs end up being part of electronic portfolios - or ePortfolios - in which students can showcase their work during and after their UWA degree?

Over the course of Teaching Month a selected number of contributors will add posts to this blog on these and other subjects related to blogging and blogging in education. Staff and students across campus are invited to add their comments to the discussion via this blog, as well as attend a Discussion Forum on Monday May 14th, from 12-2pm (including lunch) in Social Sciences Seminar room G2.08.