372: Weblogs and the Academy

2007-05-11
Session 372: Weblogs and the Academy: Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Technical Practices (A Roundtable)
Organizers: Elisabeth Carnell, Shana Worthen

Participants: Lisa L. Spangenberg, Julie A. Hofmann, Kim Laing, Richard Scott Nokes, Michael Tinkler, James Ryan Gregory

That’s a mix of blogs and professional pages in the links, per the usual legal name / pseudonym issues. If your pseud is publicly linked, I may follow suit, but not otherwise. . . . Since I didn’t write down consistently who said what, I’ve left things as “one person” or “someone” even where I remember the correct attributions. As a result, a lot of these observations sound blandly common-sensical, but they are useful, I think.

(It would really be good form to finish these write-ups and post them before the next conference occurs, wouldn’t it.)

Worthen posed a series of questions to the participants, which dovetailed into a running discussion. A non-exhaustive set of concerns and comments included these:

• Why use blogs, pedagogically speaking, in favor of other forms of tech?
  One person noted that for an assignment using a LiveJournal community and involving the analysis of primary documents, peer review (amongst that group of students) was not terribly effective. A bonus of blogs is the ease with which they let readers leave comments, after all. . . .
  Some discussion of message boards occurred as well.
• Blogs are relatively easy to administer, which is a bonus for instructors. LiveJournal was praised for allowing posts locked to a finite set of individuals and a convenient aggregate (“friends”) page.
  Spangenberg recommended that people check out Moodle as well; it’s a content management system designed “to help educators create effective online learning communities” (quoted from her handout).
• The asynchronicity of blog posts and comments (students can contribute anytime) is a plus to balance against needing to keep up with what’s posted. Someone strongly recommended the use of categories or tags to help both instructors and students retrieve the cumulative results of ongoing discussion.
• Teleconferencing (two locations) is a shiny idea, but it brings much larger technical problems—audio some days without video, the reverse on other days, etc. The person who’d tried this noted that students lost interest in the seriousness of the class’s undertaking; during technical difficulties one day, the temptation to comment on the other school’s students became irresistible, and later they learned that that school could hear their comments just fine. Oops.
• Someone noted that some students don’t really want to participate in online discussion. He suggested that instructors make a point of announcing blogs’ importance (or whichever tech) during the first week of class; it can help to weed out people who might be unhappy later anyway. [On the other hand, it means students are less likely to become pleasantly surprised by something they thought they’d hate, since they’ll have left.]
• E-mail and listservs are a simpler forum for online discussion than blogs, and they’re not dead yet.
• Worth remembering: sometimes students express themselves more effectively when not coerced—that is, when online discussion isn’t part of the grade—and when they’re speaking directly to the instructor rather than speaking before an audience of their peers. It’s not as though a change of media gives people things to say.
• A follow-up to that: blogging as a required component of class participation can become “I have to do this thing for the instructor” rather than “I have something cool to contribute to the discussion.”
• Privacy: FERPA was namechecked as something all instructors should be familiar with. Panelists mentioned students who’d wanted publicity based on their blog posts and comments, who’d referred friends and family (or been sad that a discussion was locked from public view), and, conversely, who’d been stalked on Facebook.
  Someone suggested that syndication (RSS, atom, etc.) was potentially invasive, but direct visits were okay, since they could be tracked more easily.
• Several panelists agreed that it’s instructive to show students how easily data about them can be found via Google.
• Pedagogy and the world outside of higher ed—consider maintaining more than one blog and splitting things by topic so that they’re easier to find and retain their audience members, who may be reading for a specific interest of their own rather than because they care about your dog, etc.

Afterwards, I was pleased to meet Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light, very briefly, who by the session’s end had produced an amazingly detailed doodle.