Coming About

In preparation for submitting an IRB to conduct a research study of our graduate students use of blogs, I’m reviewing the literature (what little there is out there) on blogs as a tool for reflective practice. Rather than summarize what I’m finding in a word document, I’m going to organize the relevant citations I’ve found here to organize my thoughts about how to frame this upcoming study.

I’m also experimenting with publishing a “private” blog entry: we want to know if this is feasible in Edublogs before we tell our students that they can do it. We anticipate that there may be times when our students want to record their innermost thoughts in a private entry and have them as part of their reflective journal, but without the scrutiny of professors or fellow learners. 

I do hope, though, that we can encourage the kind of shared collaboration and dialogue that is emerging in my ADLT 620 class wiki. I’ve been really struck by the authenticity of voice, the elegance in writing, and the compelling ideas expressed by the 8 students in this class. Perhaps they are simply an exceptional group — I prefer to think, however, that they are representative of the quality of students we have in the program: mature, engaged, and increasingly thoughful about adult learning as a discipline worthy of study.

What my colleague Bill Muth and I would like to do is explore our Adult Learning students use of blogging to reflect on content as well as to examine the changes in perspective that result from their personal and professional growth during the time that they are earning a master’s degree. In fall 2008, we plan to introduce the use of Edublog as the blogging tool that will replace the very static and cumbersome e-portfolio Blackboard tool that we have been using since Fall 2006 for reflective journaling.

Here’s where my literature search has taken me: I’ve searched ERIC and ABIInform (business database), and PsychInfo for the terms “blog” or “weblog” in combination with terms “reflection,” “reflective practice,” “reflection in action,”  “reflection on action,” “knowing in action.”  I’ve also searched these databases for terms “narrative”  and “identity”  and “narrative”  and “identity construction.”  For all articles I’ve reviewed as pertinent to our inquiry, I’ve reviewed the references for each article, and I have expanded our sources to include selected books and articles from these reference lists.  The majority of these, with the exception of some resources on reflection / reflective practice, and those related to narrative and identity construction, have been written since 2000.  This is, indeed, a relatively new field of inquiry as soon as the medium of blogging is introduced into the search.  I’ve gone to the Educause database (the Educause Learning Initiative) to locate articles and newsletters that write about blogs, and I’ve located the Pew study on the American Life Project which examines the role of these changing technologies in our society.

Here’s What I’ve Learned About Blogs

A Socially Constructed Knowledge Format

 Blogs have an inherent capacity for collaboration and communication, unlike a traditional reflective journal which is written by the learner and shared (only) with the instructor.  Because blogs exist as web pages, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, they are meant to be read, commented upon by interested readers, and linked (through the hyperlink capacity) to other sites. This creates a naturally occurring social network for communication and dialogue. It is this capacity which makes the blog a place for knowledge construction (and co-construction); the blogger can easily become part of a community of practice with others who read, share, and exchange ideas.  This may not seem like a big deal at first, but for those who adhere to the view that knowledge is socially constructed and situated in context, the blog takes on pedagogical qualities congruent with this learning paradigm.

Blogs, and Other Web 2.0 Tools (Like Wikis) are Transforming the Internet

The best description I’ve found so far about the transformative potential of Web 2.0 tools for changing us as a society comes from Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom (2006).  Richardson writes, 

We are at the beginning of a radically different relationship with the Internet, one that has long-standing implications for educators and students. The coming years will be marked by a flood of new innovation and ideas in teaching, most born from the idea that we can now publish and interact in ways never before possible.  In reality, we now have a Read/Reflect/Write/Participate Web, one that will continue to evolve and grow in ways not yet thought of, spurred by the efforts of creative teachers who recognize the potential to improve student learning. 

Technorati’s Feb 11, 2008 blog count exceeded 185 million blogs worldwide, with 175,000 being created each day.  The implications for a knowledge-connected and knowlege constructing society are huge, particularly when we consider how fast the half-life of current knowledge is shrinking. In some professional knowledge domains (like medicine), what today’s graduates learn will be out of date within 2-3 years. By necessity, we must all become continuous learners just to stay current!

Blogs are part of a new media literacy

Blogs, and their Web 2.0 counterparts, are part of a new, and necessary, type of literacy for all adults — media literacy.  Educators have asserted that blogs can enhance critical thinking (Oravec, 2002), enable people to become more thoughful and critical observers of the world around them (Blood, 2002), and enhance basic reading and writing literacy skills (Godwin-Jones, 2003). They are vehicles that can empower individuals to exercise authentic “voice” in writing about their experiences and making sense of them. It makes sense to me that no student in the Adult Learning program at VCU should graduate without having some degree of comfort and competence in media literacy. To do that, those of us who teach in the program will have to create time and space in our classes for modeling these new literacies.

References

Blood, R. (2002). Weblogs: A history and perspective. In J. Rodzvilla (Ed.), We’ve got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture (pp. 7-16). New York: Basic Books.

Godwin-Jones, R. (2003). Emerging technologies: Blogs and wikis: Environments for online collaboration. Language, Learning & Technology, 7(12), 12-16.

Oravec, J. A. (2002). Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 45(5), 616-621.