this work is published under a CC attribution - non commercial - share alike licence
The Post Industrial Media Project is a collaborative teaching and learning research project undertaken by Adrian Miles, Allan Thomas, David Carlin, Glen Donnar, Paul Ritchard, Rachel Wilson and Seth Keen of the RMIT Media program.
It is probably easiest to begin with why not to blog.
You don't blog because it is new, fashionable, or a panacea to teaching ills. You will use a blog because what a blog provides or allows for supports something you want to achieve in your teaching and learning. These aims (it should be obvious) should come first, then you can work out what technologies will support or work with these outcomes.
Blogging does not automatically make student writers (in much the same way that inviting students to have a journal or write essays does not, of itself, make them writers). The use of a blog needs to be modelled and scaffolded so that its use is understood, makes sense to the students, and of course is relevant to what they're doing. (And if you introduce a blog, expect a lot of writing, but only provide it with minimal assessment weight then students will not use it - they can count!)
Additionally, blogging, by itself, does not make, produce or develop collaboration. If you think this then you probably also think that setting a group project also produces and develops collaboration. Collaboration is a learnt skill, which means it can be taught, and assessed for equitably (the most common complaint amongst students about group work is that workload is never evenly distributed, and assessment is therefore inequitable as a result). Ditto with blogs and collaboration. Blogs can help collaboration, but how this happens is not self evident, so to support and enable collaboration you need to do more than just introduce a blog.
A first decision about the use of blogs involves whether they will be individual, or collaboratively authored. The scale of this group can be whatever you wish, though beyond small groups it tends to become more like a discussion board or even an email list than a blog as there is something about the small scale writing and participation in a blog that makes it, well, a blog.
Personally, I am not a fan of group blogs as a point from which to introduce or teach blogging skills. A blog is quite close to a journal, even a diary, and so students have some familiarity with writing something that contains their own content. In addition, the ability to customise a blog can be very important in helping students take ownership of their blogs. When it is a group blog, this gets problematic. Think of a blog as like a lecture journal, I put my pictures on the front, my graffiti, my notes. This makes it mine. If it were a group lecture journal this individual ownership and decorating is gone. Now, that might not matter since I know all about writing and lecture journals, but a blog is something new for me, so it needs to be mine. In addition, in a group blog it is easy for an individual to feel overwhelmed by other contributors, or to have someone with some tech skills who just designs and geeks it out and so feel marginalised because you don't have similar skills. Finally, our use of blogs within the media program is very strongly tied to reflective practice, and this is probably best achieved through the use of individual blogs as reflective practice in our context is aligned to individual's self awareness as learners and practitioners.
(Another hesitation I have around group blogs is that they are used as a form of group learning and, generally, group assessment. They are used almost by rote - n students share a blog and all will receive a mark and, since you can all write to it it must of course be group learning, and so on. This can often be a disaster, for all the usual reasons students attach to group projects. However, I think that if a group blog were used in a context where group work was properly structured and developed they may be very effective. There are certainly examples of group blogs that are very effective, for example http://grandtextauto.org/ springs to mind, but there are also many that simply collapse under the weight of their good intentions. Of course the same can be said of individual blogs too!)
Finally, many of the better blog systems allow the owner to invite and manage other contributors. This means any student can turn their blog into a group blog if and when they wish, or need to. Alternatively as students get comfortable with blogs they do become as familiar as lecture note pads so it becomes trivial to set up a group blog for a specific project, and this has been a common practice within our media program.
An odd title really. Particularly since slow writing is posed as something outside of the computer and emphasises writing long hand. So, why slow writing? Because when you write in a blog you have to externalise your ideas, and in doing this you (obviously) have to think through them. It is a thinking out through a writing out. As you write out what you think you make an argument, and writing by its very logic and structure is where we place those arguments (well, in language but you get what I mean). If your argument isn't making sense, this is where you begin to realise this.
The second aspect of slow writing is that in a blog your writing is now public. As a consequence, and courtesy of the post based nature of writing and publishing here, the writing needs to be written out well enough to make sense. Not just to yourself, but to anybody else. This makes it very different to the sorts of note taking that we all do personally - whether as notes in the margins of books, or those comments after lectures or papers that three weeks later appear more like poetry because of how cryptic they now appear. This public writing forces a more detailed writing out of whatever is being written about in the blog because I know that others can and will read it, and so it needs to make sense.
These two things combined make the writing more detailed, more informed, than what I might write in my notepad, it also means I write less in my blog than I might write in lectures, my personal diary, and so on. The object is not to make it exhaustive or complete (I would have thought Tristram Shandy demonstrated the silliness of that some time ago), but that what is written is legible and intelligible for others. The entries could be brief - pointing to useful or interesting things found online, or detailed as an idea is noted, explicated, detailed or even interrogated. But the rule of thumb is that others read it as well so it must be understandable for others. This is heightened in a blog since readers can enter the blog at any point, at any post (not perhaps the blog's front screen), and so there can be no assumption that they have read some other post or posts first - indeed, if what you write relies on these other posts you should link to them. Since a reader might arrive at any post, anywhere from your blog's history, students tend to be encouraged to learn this basic assumption of writing in a blog, that content will forming a whole (the entire blog), is actually made up of highly discreet and freestanding parts. It's a bit like Lego really.
Blogs encourage regular writing. They can do this because blog posts are brief, usually deal with a specific or at least one general idea (if you find that blog posts are becoming long and covering several ideas a good rule of thumb is to turn each of these into their own blog posts), and allow for an informal writing style.
We all have lots of 'voices'. The language, tone, terms I use when talking to my mum, daughter, wife, baby, friends, colleagues, students, and so on are all different. Much traditional academic writing requires and expects a single voice. In a blog however these other voices and languages are legitimate. One post might be academic in tone and tenor, another informal as you write about the gig you went to on the weekend, and another tone and voice for reflecting on your project.
Blogs posts are time and date based, and most decent blog systems let you future publish. This means I might write three posts today, but I choose to publish one of them in two days and another in four days. This means that content appears regularly, which encourages readers, and of course also promotes students in developing things to write about.
The key things are brief regular content is much better in a blog than irregular long content. It is a form that emerged on and in the network, and so places its emphasis on being small parts that can be easily connected (linked to).
The outcome of all of this is that students are able to develop their writing and critical thinking skills as they write regularly. The writing tasks are of a scale that lets it be self managed, and as everyone knows, the key to successful writing is being able to write regularly.
Most blogs are public, which means anyone can read what is written in the blog. It is also possible to limit who can read a blog. For example a blog might exist within an learning management system within an institution and so be subject to all the rules and access controls of all other content in the system (which ideally should be easily controlled between private, available to nominated individuals/groups, and completely public).
There are significant issues when you blog publicly. These are a combination of network etiquette, media law, spam, and your reputation. A great deal of these are avoided if blog access is constrained. They can also be avoided if you allow pseudonymous blogging where the students authentic identity is hidden or otherwise not attached to the blog. There are no right or wrong approaches here, just better and worse where what is better (or worse) very strongly depends on what educational outcomes you seek.
In my own practice I strongly discourage anonymity or pseudonymity. This is because I use blogs to let students become knowledge producers, and so their work (which is theirs) should be identifiable as theirs. In addition blogs allow a range of what you could describe as 'collateral' outcomes, each of which is highly relevant to networked practice and literacies (which all students should have to some extent - network literacy this century is what print literacy was to the 19th). These collateral outcomes are described below, but include things like developing and controlling your own network identity, learning in an authentic context the legal and IP obligations of working in these environments, developing an ethics of practice and taking responsibility for your learning and writing.
These things may still occur where blog authors are not easily identified, but they may be lessened. In a nutshell my students are introduced to all of these topics quite explicitly, they are discussed (and revisited as appropriate), and they are treated as adults. As I point out, they are old enough to vote, get a gun licence, drive a car, have sex, drink and buy alcohol, and get married without their parent's permission. I think they are also old enough to be responsible for, and about, what they write publicly, and they should learn about these things before they enter any professional environment.
On the other hand many teachers may allow students to use pseudonyms to encourage expression and confidence, and to allow them to make mistakes that don't get 'attached' to students since their identity is easily linked to what has been written. For example you can imagine writing something as a student that you are later embarrassed by, which might even embarrass you or cause problems professionally. My own view is that if you are able to acknowledge mistakes (and don't forget if a blog remains available to the student author then they can always amend any post), correct them, demonstrate an ability to reflect and change, then these are generally more valuable assets and skills than not learning the confidence to write with your name attached.
Hence some peer learning happens because students very quickly begin to read each other's blogs. They work out who writes the best cheat notes from the lecture (that you may have missed), who writes really funny stuff about the weekend, and who it turns out is just good at this stuff because their blog looks so amazing. A common anxiety as this begins is that students may not be reading only course related material, or that what they write about the course may be tangential, or even just plain wrong.
So let's pause and think about this. First of all as you read or at least skim what students are writing about what you're teaching you get a very good sense of the zeitgeist of your cohort (good and bad). You can use this to change what you're doing, simply be getting a sense of what is going on via their blogs. Secondly you will see how much they understand, or more important don't understand, from the material, whether it be lectures, readings, tutes, or each other. Personally I've found this last aspect fascinating, as the distance between what I thought I was saying and meant, versus what has been interpreted never fails to surprise me, but of course it then lets me see what actually needs clarification and time and what doesn't.
As the use of blogs develop a blog 'ecology' will develop. Some students will write fantastic reflective or critical posts, and many students will read these. They'll read them out of interest, curiosity, to catch up, to find out what they should be doing, and to learn what good work actually looks like. They'll read the grumpy blogs (the ones that like to complain, bait others, always bemoan something) will also attract readers in the same way that tabloid papers sell. Each of these will form 'clusters' of attention, and around them everyone else will settle. Small 'communities' will form, of course based on existing friendships but others form based on subject and project participation and the discovery of interests - whether sport, music, readings, films and so on.
In all of this do not be surprised by how much of each others writing (blogging) is read, and how much is shared from your teaching. Links to references, web sites, restatements of key ideas or practices and so on, it can be quite remarkable.
It is a simple truism now that the ability to record, capture, edit and then distribute photos, video, and audio has become an everyday literacy. Blogs are exemplary in making it very easy for students to publish a variety of media. This is because most blog systems either support these different media automatically (you add the media via the blog system and it knows what to do with it and lets you add it to a blog post), or they integrate with existing sites that host photos, audio and videos.
This means students can use their blogs to produce a sophisticated portfolio of work (for example by establishing a category or tag that selects individual posts for a portfolio), but more significantly they can also use a variety of media in their learning. A tute paper could also be a podcast (and then imagine collating all the student podcasts into a single page and having that available for next year's cohort). A video report might be used in another context. This helps students use a variety of cognitive styles in their learning, and if you're flexible enough as a teacher even let them use the media that best suits their learning styles.
Finally, the ability to include a variety of media develops a range of media literacies in students and also encourages the students to treat their blogs as personal media portals rather than just a reporting site for their teacher/s.
These different media can be captured on domestic digital cameras (which pretty much all record video), many mobile phones, and home video. Copyright is an issue, and should not be ignored.
One of the advantages of existing Learning Management Systems (this is what large centrally administered online learning systems are usually known by, the acronym LMS appears alot in the education literature) is that they lower the technological and technical threshold to entry for teachers and students. This is of course their major benefit, and perhaps the only real reason why they've proven so popular (well, that's wrong, there is the major investment that institutions are required to make in these platforms which encourages their use, and of course they also encourage an IT empire of their own in terms of support, administration and so on, but that's another story). They are easy to use.
This should in no way be underestimated, as if the technology can move to the 'background' then as teachers and students we can concentrate on learning rather than 'driving' the technology. This is where blogs are exemplary. Most of the major blogging systems are very simple to use, and so it only takes a couple of lessons to develop enough technical literacy to be able to write, post, link to others, add links to your blogroll, use categories and add images. This is why if you're going to blog you should use a proper blog system - not something that doesn't make all that was just listed very easy. (You'd be suprised, there are many systems that have attached a 'blog' like thing to what they do but they don't do any of the basic things of blogging very well.)
I guess this is what you get from using a very specific tool (blogs were developed to blog, which might sound obvious but threaded discussion forums were not developed for teaching, unlike lecture theatres which were developed to lecture...). However, the more literate you get the better your blogging experience will be. This should not be surprising, after all as a teacher you already know that the more you know about something the more sophisticated your experience of understanding of it will be (you already knew that, right?) and so it is with blogs. The analogy I use here is of course print literacy. We are highly print literate - we know what books are, where to find them, the names of their keepers (librarians), that they have covers, spines, titles, pages, page numbers, can be quoted, cited, referred to, borrowed, and so on. We can also write and read. This is a sophisticated literacy, but one which is completely and necessarily taken for granted in our education system. When it comes to working online, on being network literate (as the online equivalent of print literacy) being familiar in the blog is important. There is some more about this at the node that talks about how to encourage blogging.
So, a blog is simple to use. You will still need someone to install whatever system you are using and run, unless you use a free external service (see the Where to Blog node for more on this) but you can be up and running inside of one class. Remember, if you are not willing to invest the time it takes to let your students be comfortable in using their blogs then they will not be willing to use them. It really is that simple (how many years have they been taught how to write an essay - why would we think that a blog, as a complementary or collateral literacy - can be learnt by osmosis?) and using the blog really does need to be the content of the first blog lesson. Because it is easy to do you can quickly move on to worrying and developing content and using the blog for teaching and learning, and not get bogged down in some of the common things that happens with the teaching of IT where teaching becomes little more than a constant introduction of new features and 'tricks'.
Expect this sort of comment or observation will be repeated in various places throughout this cookbook. The more control students have over their blogs, the more likely they are to use them. This not only includes what they write but the ability to customise the design of their blogs. Think of high school folders covered in stickers and graffiti, your students will do the equivalent with their blogs. IT administrators, even some teachers, will misread this as proof that blogs aren't about learning, though oddly enough not many seem to think that that enormous ACDC sticker on the lecture pad cover and the doodles throughout the lecture notes is evidence that lecture pads aren't suitable for learning. (And you could also lean over to note that same academic's doodles and perhaps mentions something about people in glass houses?)
The ability to customise the blog depends on the blog system being used, the existing skills of yourself and your students, and how much teaching you want to do. Remember however, there since blogs exist online there is an enormous amount of very accurate, very well written material explaining how to customise any blog system online, so providing access to that and some rudimentary pointers is often all that is needed to get the ball rolling. Some blog systems (for example at edublogs.org) will provide a range of templates that you can select from, but also the opportunity to further customise this if you're comfortable doing so. At a minimum there should be a variety of templates that your students can choose from so that they can at least exercise some choice in how their blog appears.
If this is the first time the majority of your students have worked or at least had some control over their online presence then expect a riot of bad design. Poor choice of colours, and so on. If you use blogs in an ongoing way they usually grow out of it (I've been online long enough to remember the joys of the first background tag when we all made really ugly tiled backgrounds for our web pages, and if that is too far in the past for you ask someone about the blink tag!) but unless you really want or need to teach something about design, don't worry about it. Why? Well, it is like using coloured pencils in primary school, or coloured textas in high school on those projects. Lots of colour that is about exploring, making, owning. It is part of the pleasure of being able to write that we can use these colours (its only in the senior years that writing becomes reduced to its protestant heritage of plain fonts, with that severe black on white).
Now you may run into problems, perhaps because the blog system you've been given has a generic design or no one quite sees why being able to modify the look of the blog matters if it is about writing. One good answer is once again the lecture pad or notebook example I used above. Would anyone seriously think that providing (indeed, insisting) that every student must only use one approved version of a lecture notepad, with this many pages, this colour cover, this specific size, actually be a good idea. Let alone be enjoyed by the students? And then of course since any decoration of these is also prohibited what do you think would actually happen. Now, the answer is simple, since print literacy is so deeply embedded they would still use the books since they understood the need to take notes, but there would be an entire invisible (to us, certainly to those who made up these asinine rules) culture of markings on these lecture pads that would be small but significant statements of difference. They would be personalised. They would have to be personalised. (If you think that sounds fanciful have a look at any group of high school students in school uniform and note the variety they deliberately achieve within what you'd think would be a pretty strict set of constraints.) Now shift this to blogs. You want a new technology and a new practice to be adopted, but you will not let the users customise it. This is a recipe for failure. There is no ambiguity here. Blogs are about empowering individuals as writers, and a very basic part of writing on the web is that the web (and blogs) are malleable. They change. New posts, new content, new designs. To not support this is to treat your blogs as books, they're not books but if you are stuck with something fixed you'd probably have more luck with journals (the paper kind) than blogs.
When was the last time you Googled an academic's name? Just to find out who they are? Their work? What about a prospective employer? Consciously or not we use Google like this all the time, and our students routinely will use Google to find out about companies or places where they may be hoping to work.
Now it might not happen yet, but certainly at some point in the near future you can expect your employer to be Googling your name to see what they find. What would someone find if they Googled your name? Do you actually appear anywhere in Google? Why? Where? What Google dishes up on you is the simplest way to describe or define your network identity.
A blog lets you have a lot of control over this, well, at least more control than many have. This is because if you write your blog regularly, and people link to it (even if it is just quite a few of your peers) then you are likely to get a very high page rank in Google. This means that someone searches on your name it is your blog they find. You write your blog. No one else does. This means you control what is being said and how. And of course since a blog consists of many parts it then becomes an excellent vehicle to produce a network identity. Posts that are personal, playful, academic. Photos, links to what you're interested in, and so on. A blog provides quite a lot of a particular sort of information about someone, but in a way that is about you.
If you read a blog, a good blog, then you get a sense of that person's interests, what they've been doing and so on. It does not have to be in detail, but an identity emerges over time. This identity will increasingly matter as you will be Googled by others and what they find will help inform their view of you. A blog simply helps you control what they find and what matters in terms of how you choose to represent yourself online, rather than what other bits and pieces might be found - or what others might have written!
Let's just drop the 'e' from 'e' portfolio and accept that the network is a fundamental part of our education and professional practice so a portfolio is a portfolio. There have been a variety of Learning Management Systems that have added 'eportfolio' capabilities recently, on the understanding that assessment by portfolio (rather than by a single 'monumental' piece of work) can be a more relevant form of assessment. The idea of a portfolio also suggests something the student can use to showcase what they have done or achieved, and possibly even something that they can take with them as graduates, or at least point to as they begin their professional careers.
Having said that most university's lock up the LMS's so that those outside the university cannot get access, and also regularly remove student content once they are no longer students, so the idea of a portfolio as a collection with value is rather dramatically diluted unless you can provide a way to preserve this collection into the future. This also applies to blogs. If we value the writing and other work that students may achieve in their blogs what does it say to these same students if this content is deleted, removed or otherwise broken at some arbitrary interval not of the individual's choosing? After all, we don't shred or otherwise take away student's individual essays, note books, journals or lecture pads - well certainly not without giving the student the opportunity to collect the work and for the work to be in a durable form. That'd actually be quite scandalous. So why would you encourage them to write and publish, partly insisting on how valuable this will be for them, only to not let them keep it? Personally I don't get that at all, which is why in my practice (RMIT Media) we currently provide individual blogs for life to all students - they are only removed if the student requests it, and they can continue to publish to their blogs after graduation (or migrate them elsewhere which most choose to do since they don't actually trust large institutions to do what they say they will do - go figure).
Portfolios. A blog is a portfolio. That's it really. Of course it is also a notebook come journal so unlike the portfolio it contains the messy noisy bits and not just the polished fancy bits. However, it is simple for any student to set up a category or a tag, perhaps called 'portfolio', which they apply to all the work they regard as exemplary. This collects it all for them automatically under a portfolio archive so that the student can easily find it, refer to it, and exhibit or show it (or parts of it) to others.
In some design disciplines this can be useful as corporate style eportfolio's are irrelevant to design disciplines. You cannot present a portfolio of your work within a template that you have no control over! In other disciplines the blog as a portfolio can be highly effective as the student can still control or exercise choice over how the material is presented. For instance a student with good design skills will ensure that the templates, that is the design of the 'container' that displays their work, is excellent. Other students, for example those who may be wonderful writers and this is what matters, can just as easily present their work in a way that emphasises their writing skills.
Now if a blog is used as the portfolio itself (for example via a category or tag) then of course it is trivial for whoever is viewing the portfolio (imagine a prospective employer) to view the rest of the content in the blog. This suggests several possibilities. Since the blog allows them to collect, collate and notate work as it happens and so build their portfolio through their semesters they can, once they have identified this work, move it elsewhere if they want to showcase only this work. This is quite easy to do, and made more so by the fact that the portfolio has been developed in situ and is not some sort of retrospective trawling through a semester's, years, or entire degree's worth of work. The second option is to recognise that propsective employers (or whoever else you would like to see the portfolio) will increasingly value graduates who can demonstrate creativity and critical reflection and this is clearly evidenced in and through a good blog rather than a series of highly crafted portfolio pieces.
Finally, a portfolio can be thought of as not only the collection of high points that you extract to show other people, but also the things that you can identify and revisit as high points for yourself. A blog provides context for the portfolio as it is always embedded (surrounded) by other posts which provide thick description for the individual and the work.
There are quite a few ways to describe or think about what constitutes reflective practice, and why it is worth doing. The simplest way I think about it and regard it as relevant to all teaching is that if you teach students some strategies or skills to support them in being able to creatively and critically reflect on their own practice then they are developing meta-cognition skills that are relevant in all that they do. This contributes to their professional practice and careers, to them as individuals and of course is one of the more effective ways to encourage and develop life long learning.
Reflecting on practice is a multifaceted thing. It can include quite literal exercises and activities that require students (whether individually or in groups) to be able to pay attention to how they go about doing things, and why, in a specific discipline. For example when they are confronted by a particular sort of problem what strategies do they use to begin to solve it? Which ones seem more successful? What other strategies do others use?
More commonly in education contexts you can use reflective practice to reflect on your own learning as a process. After all this is the practice that every student (and teacher) has in common in a university, you are all participating in the practice of education, and so being able to reflect on this critically and constructively can achieve a great deal.
Such reflective practice needs to be given time, and modelled, for it to work. Design disciplines have always done a form of this through the studio critique, and aspects of this can be applied in other contexts. In my experience the key things to foster reflective practice are:
It is this last point that ties most neatly with the use of blogs. A blog, as a journal like public writing and thinking space, can be used to write out guided or required tasks that concentrate on reflection. What did writing a blog feel like? What does writing an essay feel like? submitting work? getting feedback? what about feedback from your peers? If you can encourage blogging in such a way that students routinely write about their experience of learning (and not just the content of what they have learnt) then they are able to develop a language about their learning.
As mentioned under why not to blog" a blog needs to be integrated into the curriculum to be effective.