Blogs as tools for teaching and learning

The use of all kinds of online educational technologies has been enabled by the advent of Web 2.0 and the use of such technologies is on the rise in both schools and higher education establishments. This is in reaction to a variety of factors, including the increasing number of distance or open-learning students and the familiarity and ease that the younger generation of students is assumed to have with the Internet. The way in which the Internet can act as a means to deliver content and provide students with access to information has been seized on with enthusiasm by many in education. It is argued that young people are used to commenting on the contributions of their friends on Facebook and other social networking sites and therefore will be open to using Internet tools such as blogs as educational tools. However, some studies suggest that students still primarily see the Internet as a tool for communicative and social software uses rather than a means for accessing educational information (Selwyn, 2008 – and it is interesting that in this study blogging was classified as a purely communicative tool rather than associated with teaching and learning).

There are good arguments for the use of blogs in teaching and learning both in schools and in further and higher education. Blogs can be used to enable interaction between individual classmates or between a class and its teacher or to offer peer assessment and feedback opportunities (Duffy and Bruns, 2006). Blogs can support learning in a number of ways: they can be used by students and tutors to gather and exchange online resources – particularly useful for disciplines where printed materials quickly become out of date; comments can be made on students’ blogs by both their peers and the tutor; and they can be used to establish communities, particularly among geographically distant students. One of the first major blogging initiatives in higher education was established at Harvard University in 2002. The Harvard weblogs project was the product of a conference at the Berkman Center in November 2002 entitled ‘What is Harvard’s Digital Identity?’ and aimed to promote lifelong learning and a community based around Harvard (Williams and Jacobs, 2004).

Blogs are deemed to be particularly useful for subjects that have traditionally used some kind of reflective journal keeping as a way in which students can reflect on their progress, for example foreign language classes or teacher training. The informality of blogging, in contrast to the formal language demands of assignments, can encourage more experimentation on the part of the student and the blog can serve as an online portfolio of their work. It offers a place for writing practice, but also the possibility of a responsive audience through the written comments of tutor and classmates. Huffaker (2005) contends that blogs can promote literacy through the use of storytelling in classrooms and because of their ease of use they are suitable for all ages and both genders. Blogs can also assist individuals to develop their own writing voice, which may discourage plagiarism and encourage more interaction in classroom discussions (Oravec, 2003).

Teachers can also use a blog in order to communicate with students outside class time. Through their blog they can direct students to appropriate resources on the Internet, offer more information than is possible within the confines of a scheduled class and write about subjects in a more personal or informal voice. This type of blog could be used by the teacher over a number of years in order to build up resources and teaching materials, which can be made accessible to the students even after the teaching time has finished. A male respondent to the 2007 survey who lectures at a British university reported:

It is interesting that he has made blogging compulsory since this touches on one of the key debates related to the use of blogging in education – whether or not it should be optional or compulsory. As will be seen below, some of the proponents of the use of blogs as an educational tool suggest that such blogging must be on a voluntary basis if students are to make the best use of such a flexible tool.

One of the main early uses of blogs in higher education has been to offer distance-learning students a way of communicating informally with both their peers and their tutors. Dickey (2004) argues that blogs provide new strategies for bridging the feelings of frustration and isolation suffered by some distance-learners and that the informality of blogs allows students to ‘vent’ and express their feelings as well as to respond to their assignments. Blogs can also be used by students as storage systems for useful information – links, their own notes, drafts of essays. Kerawalla et al. (2009) investigated postgraduates’ use of blogs within an Open University course and suggested that there were six factors that influenced these students’ blogging: perceptions of, and a need for, an audience; perceptions of, and a need for, a community; the utility of and need for comments; the presentational style of the blog content; the technological context; and the pedagogical content of the course. For these postgraduate students, unlike the students in the male respondent’s class mentioned above, blogging was not a compulsory part of the course. The course materials suggested some blogging activities, but students were free to use their blog in any way that they wished. Overall, Kerawalla et al. found five types of blogging behaviour among these students: blogging avoidance; resource network building; support network building; self-sufficient blogging; and anxious, self-conscious blogging to complete the course activities in the mistaken belief that blogging was compulsory (Kerawalla et al., 2008). Those students who did use their blog were generally appreciative of the way in which their blog was owned by themselves and was a place for their own learning and thinking. It should also be noted that some of the students enjoyed having a place where they could communicate with and vent their frustrations to their peers and appreciated the informality of the blog. Not all students appreciated the networking opportunities offered by a blog, however – a few did not blog at all and chose not to engage with the course community through their blog but instead used it purely as a store for their own notes and materials. Kerawalla and her team note that such behaviours challenge the popular assumption that blogs are primarily a communication tool. Overall, they found that the majority of the students found blogging to be helpful in supporting their learning, but that there was not one way in which the blogs were used. This very flexibility of blogging can mean that it can cause problems for educators who wish to introduce blogging into the classroom.

The introduction of blogging into the curriculum does not necessarily guarantee positive outcomes. Problems associated with using blogs as learning tools include minimal or haphazard contributions to their blogs by students; students writing a bare minimum in their blogs in order to achieve a minimal pass; students’ difficulties in understanding the rationale behind blogging; and limited or no communication between students in their blogs (as cited in Kerawalla et al., 2008). Many of these issues are not exclusive to blogging or indeed Internet-based educational tools, but instead will be familiar to most teachers and university lecturers who have dealt with any classroom-based activity. The reluctance of some students either to share good ideas or information or to criticise, and perhaps undermine, someone else’s efforts, and the knowledge that even an apparently informal discussion may be making an impression on an assessor, even if not formally assessed itself, can make many students unhappy or unwilling to contribute to class discussions and projects.

De Almeida Soares (2008) reported on a class blog that she set up with nine pre-Intermediate EFL students in Brazil with the aim of fostering a sense of community and establishing a collaborative discussion space where students might reflect in more depth, in writing, about themes developed in class. She hoped that the students would be able to develop critical reading and writing skills by commenting on and correcting each others’ written work. However, she discovered that the students were unwilling to contribute or respond to comments on the blog, although they were happy to read it in class. Her conclusions were that she had been naïve to think that just because her students were computer literate they would take to blogging eagerly and that she needed to make time in class for them to contribute to the blog rather than expect them to blog at home. Similarly, the MBA students surveyed by Williams and Jacobs (2004) at the Queensland University of Technology found blogs an effective aid for teaching and learning but felt that they needed greater direction at the beginning of the course in how to blog and what they could expect to get out of it.

Such issues with using blogs in teaching led Krause (2005) to state three basic rules for the use of blogs in teaching in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. First, he felt it to be important to acknowledge that students may not necessarily want to blog. Second, he contended that blogs do not help writers interact – he found that his students barely acknowledged each others’ postings and felt that a discussion forum or e-mail list would offer more possibilities for such interaction. Third, he suggested that blogs work best for publishing texts that are more or less finished. In contrast to Krause, Duffy and Bruns (2006) argue that discussion forums are not necessarily better than blogs because blogs enable individual voices to have a specific space of their own whereas discussion forums are community spaces where individual voices can be lost.

The use of blogs as educational tools is therefore still a subject for debate and, again, the main criterion for success appears to be commitment. Blogs can be very flexible tools – Oravec describes them as a ‘malleable and fluid medium’ (2003: 225). Teachers can find blogs to be useful as an information store for themselves and their students or as a tool with which to communicate more informally with students outside class or others in the profession. Students can find blogs similarly helpful in providing communication and support between peers, particularly when they are geographically distant; as an information store; as a way of communicating informally with tutors; and as an online portfolio of their work, where drafts might be commented on by tutors or other students. However, this very flexibility of blogs can also bring problems. Students may be confused or uneasy about the rationale behind an educational blog; may be worried about being judged by others; may simply not wish to blog; or may undertake the least amount of blogging necessary to pass that class. To at least tackle this last point, blogging should probably be used as an optional tool rather than a compulsory or assessed part of a course. It is evident from the research already undertaken that blogging can be a very useful educational tool, both as a form of information store and a support and communication mechanism, for students and teachers who wish to use it, but as usual such uses can not be forced on the unwilling blogger.

Academic blogs

Part of my 2007 research project involved the establishment of a related blog. When contacting potential survey respondents I directed them towards my blog to read about and comment on the project. This had two main benefits: first, it established my credentials as a researcher with some sort of history in the area of media and communication. The blog included links to some of my previous articles and research projects and also to my university webpage. Second, it established me as a member of the blogosphere, thus validating my interest in the respondents’ blogging habits and demonstrating a personal understanding of the pleasures and pains of blogging. Thus, I was positioned not merely as a researcher peering into the blogosphere from the outside, but part of it – a fellow blogger. What I had not expected was that several of my respondents linked to my research blog in their own blogs, commenting on the fact that they had been asked to contribute to my research and even encouraging their readers to get in contact with me to become involved. Later on in the project I posted some preliminary findings from the survey on the blog and was gratified when these findings were discussed and debated by some of my readers, and not merely those who had responded to the survey but others who were interested in the research. Thus I found that the blog, which I had started mainly to validate my research, became another rich source of data collection and also enabled me to discuss my research directly with the blogging community rather than only with other academics. Murthy (2008) identifies this rich interactive potential in research blogs, arguing that they allow the researcher to engage in collaborative ethnography where the community can become invested in the researchers’ work through consultation and critique, which is what I found happening. Like Mortensen and Walker, Murthy suggests that such blogging can be conceptualised as part of the Habermassian ‘public sphere’ in which communication has the potential to become more democritised. Similarly, Erwins (2005) states that the link-focused nature of blogs allows for greater cross-fertilisation of ideas and facilitates conversations over time and space with one’s peers and the research community at large.

Thus, blogs can enable a researcher’s communication with both academic peers and the community they are researching. Additionally, of course – as this book demonstrates – blogs can be rich sources of data themselves. Blogs offer low-cost and instantaneous techniques for collecting substantial amounts of data (Hookway, 2008). They can help a researcher to access geographically distant populations and, because anonymous bloggers can be relatively unselfconscious about what they write, blogs can be used by researchers similarly to the way in which diaries have been used in historical or anthropological research. Indeed, Hookway argues that blogs can offer better resources than diaries since they are easier to find and access, being publicly available online and thus more available than unsolicited diaries, but also avoiding the problems related to diaries written for a particular research project. However, he warns that even unsolicited blogs will have been written by a self-aware author, self-selecting episodes to present him or herself to their readership in a particular light and that researchers need to take such impression management into account.

One of the key figures in discussions about academic research blogs is Jill Walker, an early academic blogger in Norway who celebrated the liberating and democratic dialogue to be found in academic blogging in the article ‘Blogging thoughts: Personal publication as an online research tool’ written with her colleague Torrill Mortensen in 2002. She became a blogger in 2000 and found it to be an important tool for her research, enabling her to develop a writing voice and a network of researchers interested in the same topics. She contends that blogging helped her to earn her PhD and find her first job (Walker, 2006). In a similar way, the male lecturer who responded to the 2007 survey reported that his blog had led to ‘invitations to write articles, helped seal the deal on a book contract, and to test ideas for it’.

However, a later article written in 2006 reported Walker’s growing ambivalence towards her blog now that she is established within the academic hierarchical system and aware that her blog is read by her students, peers and management. Gregg (2009) follows up on Walker’s article by suggesting that a notable generation gap exists between those academics who blog from secure positions within the profession and PhD and junior faculty bloggers with more marginal employment status. According to Gregg, the first group tends to blog because of a belief in the necessary transparency and accountability to the public of academic work while the second group looks to the blogosphere for support and company.

Erwins (2005) warns would-be academic bloggers about potential implications for job security, suggesting that academic search committees may be put off by the very existence of a blog, concerned about what a new appointee might blog about after he or she is hired. This was reflected in the experience of the 2007 respondent:

Walker defines three sorts of research blog: one written by public intellectuals, or those who wish to establish themselves as such; research logs; and pseudonymous blogs regarding academic life. She notes that academic blogs that are written under their author’s real name tend to be focused on traditional content and research whereas pseudonymous bloggers write about the other parts of an academic life, including the process of research and teaching, but not the content. Gregg (2009) suggests that these three types: 1. emphasise the identity of the researcher; 2. emphasise the research and 3. emphasise the workplace culture. Similar to Walker, Newson et al.’s (2009) discussion of legal blogs distinguishes between pure law blogs written by academics; law firm blogs, which discuss and provide information in the legal areas in which the firm practises; and personal law blogs with a main focus on the person employed in the legal area and their feelings rather than the law.

A good example of such a personal law blog was Anonymous lawyer (http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com/). This satirical blog was written in the persona of a bad-tempered hiring partner at a prestigious New York firm and a blook of the same name was later published and submitted for the 2007 Blooker award (see Chapter 6 for further discussion of the blook phenomenon). Kerr (2006), who is a legal blogger himself, argues that blogs do not provide a good platform for serious legal scholarship because the blog format forces the reader to focus on the latest posting rather than the most important thoughts, which may have been written much earlier. He does, however, agree that blogging can be useful in disseminating scholarship and offering quick commentary on new developments. He points out that in 2006 the circulation of the Harvard Law Review was 8,000 per issue while the most popular legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, received 25,000 visits per day. He also agrees that blogs are useful for establishing legal professionals as public intellectuals, and in a way that circumvents traditional gatekeepers such as newspaper editors.

Blogs can thus be useful to academic researchers in several ways. They offer the possibility of establishing more informal connections with their peers and their research community. They may also provide primary data for researchers in a similar way to diaries or research journals. PhD students and junior faculty members can use blogs to sustain supportive online relationships, to develop their own writing voice and to establish their expertise in a particular field. Older academics can use their blog to disseminate scholarship and establish themselves as public intellectuals. However, the very fact that so many academic blogs are pseudonymous demonstrates some of the problems associated with academic blogging. Concerns regarding the impact of blog postings on future or current careers, students or managers mean that academic blogs dealing with the realities of academic life as opposed to research are usually hidden behind pen names or very carefully written with a clear eye on the wider audience.

Information gathering

As information professionals, librarians and information managers have been quick to seize upon the potential of blogs as both personal and organisational tools.

Blogs can be used by libraries for both internal and external knowledge management. Writing on the subject of ‘Why information professionals cannot afford to ignore weblogs’ Pedley (2005) explains how libraries can use blogs to keep users informed about library news, services and resources. He suggests that blogs are more useful in this regard than newsletters or even e-newsletters, which are published periodically in comparison with the constantly updated blog, and are usually tied to a few writers or editors while blogs can offer news from many viewpoints. More personally, librarians can use blogs to keep abreast of their field and to be aware of what other information professionals are debating and discussing.

Blogs with the main aim of the conveyance of professional information can also offer the opportunity for the blogger to express his or her own opinions about this information (Bar-Ilan, 2005). Starting discussions with readers or providing details about their personal lives are usually of secondary importance to this group of bloggers, although the content and format of the blogs might drift over time (ibid.). For example, one of my original group of women bloggers, a Canadian librarian who had started her blog after hearing a speaker on the subject of library blogs at the Ontario Library Association’s Annual Super Conference, wanted to use her blog to support her continuous professional development and ‘to stay informed about changes and developments in our field’. However, she found that this was not all she wanted to write about and that her life outside the library also appeared in her blog, making it more personal than her original intentions.

Ojala (2005) argues that there are two important aspects of blogging that make it particularly useful for knowledge sharing – their community and their archives. She points out that a major problem for knowledge managers in an organisation can be getting people to share their knowledge, but that blogging can help with this, making blogs an inexpensive way in which an organisation can encourage employees to share knowledge. Williams and Jacobs (2004) agree that informal systems like blogs can be easier to implement and maintain than formal knowledge management systems. However, again, both Ojala and Pedley emphasise the need for such blogging to be a grass-roots effort rather than being imposed by management. An internal knowledge blog needs to be viewed as non-threatening by its users – a peer-to-peer tool encouraging active and informal involvement in the process of knowledge sharing.

At least one of the survey respondents made the connection between information management and blogging. Perhaps not surprisingly he was a librarian who explained:

He reported that his blog attracted readers who were also library cataloguers or librarians with similar professional interests, supporting Pedley’s contention that information professionals can gather information from the blogs of others in the same field.

However, the benefits of blogging as a way of storing and handling information were also acknowledged by survey respondents who were not professional information managers. Indeed, improvements in information handling can be an unforeseen benefit of blogging that impacts positively on a blogger’s intention to continue blogging (Miura and Yamashita, 2007) while information handling has been identified as an important motivator for both blogging and constructing personal home pages (Chun-Yao et al., 2007; Papacharissi, 2002).

Just under half of all respondents (18 in 2006 and 49 in 2007) saw blogging as useful for sharing specialist knowledge with others, although a much smaller minority (two in 2007) specifically mentioned its use as an information or reference tool, suggesting that the information-management capabilities of blogging are at present mainly perceived by information professionals rather than members of the general public. The current dominance of the journal blog in the public blogosphere may mean that the importance of information gratifications in blogging has declined in comparison to motivations related to communication and interpersonal relationships. However, about a quarter of all respondents saw blogging as useful for their work or studies (12 in 2006 and 29 in 2007), which may imply an information-storage use of blogging.

Overall, however, the survey respondents had little to say about blogging as an information or knowledge management tool, suggesting that such motivations were not of primary importance in comparison to those related to communication and personal writing and that, while blogging has been celebrated as a useful and inexpensive tool for professional knowledge managers, such uses are of less conscious importance to the non-professional blogger.