Well I believe that it has come to this; my thoughts on blogs as a valid source for facilitating learning. To start of with I will engage in an analytical tool known as a SWOT analysis. The acronym SWOT = Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. As seen in the table below.
Strengths Has the ability for instant publishing of: · Ideas, thoughts , academic information · An Online journal · The authors knowledge, and creation of new knowledge. A post has the ability to: · link related topic information with other posts, web pages, accessible documents within that post. · Have comments left on the blog from those who view the blog. · be only edited by the author/s | Weakness · Can not be edited by anyone else other than the author/s · If you disagree with the content or strongly object to the legitimacy of the content in a blog, as a viewer you can only leave a comment but cannot edit the contents. · Is not as flexible as a wiki |
Opportunities · Blogs can provide an alternative mode of teaching content to address different learning styles. · Can be an environment where learners develop, create and donate new ideas, concepts, and complex arguments to a larger audience. · Viewers of a blog may use the comments section to ask questions about the topic, to facilitate deeper engagement, to create and produce new knowledge. · Can link other blogs together to form an online learning space. | Threats · Blogs, can perhaps be instruments of abuse, or cyber bullying · Misrepresent people and facts; unintentional or intentional. · |
Now to analyse the usefulness of blogs in an education setting like a school. I believe that we are able to see the benefits of developing an online learning community that goes beyond the boundaries of a school location. However, I have some serious concerns in the area of Blogs being used as tools for cyber bullying. Perhaps, what I am trying to indicate is that a child's/learner's right to feel, and be safe in all contexts including online communities, is paramount. Therefore, I would be cautious in using Blogs, but I would use them as a source of facilitating learning to accommodate the different learning styles. I also feel that using blogs to access lesson content does display a level of flexibility for both the learner and the learning manager.
As I was constructing the SWOT analysis, I became aware of some questions floating around, about the practicability of blogs as a facilitator of learning. The questions that appeared to meander, are, who is the intended audience of a blog, what information can be retrieved and most importantly what level of engagement and agency do learners have from reading a blog? Upon doing some further investigations, I found that blogs may be beneficial in the area of reciprocal teaching First the learner/s read the text within the blog, then they formulate a a brief response to the text. The learners brief response to the text is then left in the comments section of the blog. Raymond Brown's (2010, p. 226) summation of Gaskins et. al. (1994) views on students who "complete a brief written response to a text, or a solution to a problem, or an evaluation of the efficacy of an experiment, they are more likely to participate in any discussion that follows" is important to consider. Therefore, in the light of this I would suggest that blogs are able to stimulate and facilitate academic engagement (group discussion), either online, or in the classroom, to such a degree that it can only enhance and deepen the learning experience. So to answer the question of the practicability of blogs to facilitate learning I think that I may conclude that if a learner is simply reading material from a blog and does nothing with it; a blog is useless. However, if as I have suggested in this blog post, we use blogs to stimulate and develop learning through reciprocal teaching , then it is a valuable tool to facilitate learning.
Now as to your views on the topic of the practicality of facilitating learning through the medium of blogs, please leave a comment. I believe that your comments are valuable in stimulating discussion; regardless of the contextual restraints.
References:
Brown, R. (2010) Collaborative learning. In D. Pendergast. & N. Bahr (Eds) Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (2nd ed. pp. 223-23). Crows Nest NSW: Allen and Unwin.
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