In his post, Craig Nansen has kindly extracted for us some of the more interesting comments by experts with regards to the use of blog in education.
Some of the questions addressed are:
“What advantage do blogs have over more traditional forms of information gathering?”
“What guidelines will be put into place to make sure blogs are rich in content and are worth reading?”
“How do you feel the field of education may be changing because of blogging?”
These answers from the extraction struck me particularly:
“(blogs) aren�t about information gathering � they are primarily about people connected to other people in response to others reading them.”
“Education, until recently, has been very geocentric, place centered. Now we face the prospect of having a global inter-connectivness that allows people to explore beyond their previous limitations of geography.”
“We are still generally educating children towards taking tests and doing well as individuals”
“Blogs are being used in classrooms. Many are group blogs. In one of the best ones students are pulling in items off the news and commenting back and forth on it. What more could you want? They are doing this on their own. It�s extra credit without credit. People learning together.”
“Blogs and e-mail are in your own voice. This is one reason they are so popular.”
“Some (bloggers) write several times a day. Must be willing to write badly or you would never post your writings. Informal writing. Readers know you are writing quickly and are not critical of grammar or spelling – they are forgiving.”
“When people learned to read and write they internalized information and privatized it.”
“The daily journal of a blog might not be important. The blog provides a list of things a person is interested in.”
“(with blogs) info is made public more quickly and responded to more quickly – and made available to more people – but it�s nothing new, just faster and more available.”
All the above summarise to why we believe blogs has lot of potential in our teaching and learning:
1. Ownership of the blog, as well as the knowledge (after internalisation).
2. Generates interest (and fun) for oneself, as well as among a group (which may lead to ownership as well)
3. Facilitation of communication, exachange of ideas, thoughts, reflections through posting and comments. Allows one to interact and one’s voice to be heard.
4. If blog is included as part of our continual assessment tool, can we move away from our traditional tests/exams? Our current modes of assessments have more than often resulted in students studying (often without internalisation) for that one ‘shot’ and forgetting soon after.