NSW LearnScope Blog & Podcast

And some more from Tama Leaver who captures the outcomes of a session on Blogs and Education at the recent Australian Blogging Conference. The audience seems to have been largely Primary and Higher educators but issues and concerns are the same….

The Pros

• Allowing students to connect with community, family and an intellectual arena beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
• While most educational institutions have some sort of Learning Management System (such as Blackboard), the architecture of these systems tends to be inward-focusing, getting students thinking that everything they need is inside the walls of the black box. Blogging, by contrast, is outwardly-focused and keeps students focused on the broader (potential) public or audience they may be writing for. Thus, if we’re teaching life-long skills, blogs are often better platforms, due to their openness, than other closed systems.
• Blogs can meaningfully extend the educational experience, giving students a space to engage, write and communicate beyond the tutorial room. The uptake of this opportunity will often be uneven, but it’s often the less confident students who flourish in blogged communication.
• In certain contexts, blogs can become ’student property’ once a particular unit of course is over, thus allowing students to continue to build and use their blogs
• Blogging as an ethos is about sharing knowledge, building ties and acknowledging the input of others - all key characteristics of good pedagogy!

The Cons

• Having purchased the (usually quite expensive) Learning Management System, the majority of schools and universities invest most of the training, support and infrastructure costs to maintain the hardware and use of this system. Blogging is thus often done using peripheral tools which educators must teach themselves to use rather than getting central support.
• Many institutions desire to contain and control everything that students are producing, both in terms of protecting student privacy and in terms of protecting institutional intellectual property or even just keeping work away from outside scrutiny. While this can be overcome, it’s often IT and central policies which have to be convinced and converted to make the use of blogs (and other web 2.0 tools) feasible.
• At times education in Australia is still focused on the idea of a digital divide - where the aim is to get every student access to a computer - whereas the meaningful discussion needs, really, to shift to the idea of the participation gap - where the focus needs to be on ensuring all students are familiar with network and digital literacies, thus being able the meaningfully utilise social software and other tools, which is a lot more than just having occasional access to the internet.
• The myths of the digital natives tends to scare many educators because it suggests that many younger people will always have more familiarity than their teachers and thus teachers are worried about not being knowledgeable in these areas.

[screengrab of 1M Little Gems blog]