Divitini, M., Haugaløkken, O., and Morken, E.M. "Blog to support learning in the field: lessons learned from a fiasco," 5th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT2005), IEEE Press, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2005
Blog to support learning in the field: lessons learned from a fiasco Monica Divitini, Ove Haugaløkken, Eli M. Morken Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
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Abstract In this paper we report on our experience using a blog to support teacher education. The system has been used to support communication and reflection while students were spending a period of teaching practice. The system has not been used, despite its potential usefulness. In this paper we reflect on this experience to identify strengths and weaknesses of blogs in supporting learning in the field.
1. Introduction Learning “in the field” is used in many contexts where it is useful for learners to practice what they learn at the theoretical level in a real situation. In this way learners have the possibility to gain a first-hand experience of the real situation where they are expected in the future to use what they are learning. The success of the learning process deeply depends on the capability of learners to reflect on their experiences [5]. Interactions with different people that can support, in different ways, the learning process play a key role in supporting reflection [4]. In this paper we investigate the possibility of using blogs to support informal communication, experience sharing, and reflection when learning in the field. Blogs allow easy publishing on the Web, generally supporting the chronologically presentation of entries [3]. Blogs have become very popular in the last years, and they have been used also in educational settings, see e.g. [1, 2]. In [3], the authors report different motivations to the usage of blogs: blogs can be seen as documenting one’s life, as a sort of diary, but also as a muse and as community forum. All the reported experiences seem to suggest the possible usage of blogs to support learning in the field. In this paper we report the experience with the initial adoption of a blog for supporting teacher
students following the course Practical Pedagogical Education (PPE) at our university. PPE is organized as a one-year course, with normal classes as well as teaching practice. In this course our university cooperates with 30 schools that grouped to create partnerships. A partnership includes 5 schools that give teaching practice to circa 30 students. Normally the students of a partnership are spread on the five schools of their partnership, but sometimes they all go to the same school. This happens, for example, during a takeover, i.e. when students have the responsibility for all the teaching in the school while regular teachers are away. Reflection is emphasized throughout the course and is supported with meetings and seminars, and through the production of written work. This work is part of the portfolio evaluation for the course.
2. Setting up the scene After an initial analysis of how to support PPE students, we decided to offer the students of one of the partnerships (34 persons) the possibility to use a blog during the week they took over a school. The system was intended to support informal communication, and foster experience sharing by the creation of shared diaries. For publishing our blog we used Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), a widely used tool with different add-ons provided by third parties. Design of the blog. The PPE blog is designed as a common blog plus one blog for each student, all password protected. The students have visibility of all the blogs, they can add entries to the common blog, but not to other students’ blogs. A third party solution was used for entering SMS to the blog and we informed students about the possibility to upload pictures. Introducing the system. To introduce the blog, we sent students a letter explaining the objectives of our study and informed them about the system. During a PPE seminar, we met the students to give a short introduction to the system, presenting the blog as a
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diary and as a tool for sharing ideas and getting response from peers and teachers. Since it was not possible to give students a course on how to use the system, we asked them to try it out individually. One student with a degree in informatics offered to help the other students. During the takeover this student gave an introduction to promote adoption, focusing on the simplicity of the blog and the way it could complement the university Learning Management System (LMS). Seeding. To have some initial activity on the blog, the pedagogy teacher entered two messages in the common blog, one with information on the course, and the other to motivate students to use the blog. Following is the content of this second message. “…When the regular teachers at the school return from their study tour, they will need to be updated on what has been going on in their classes. While we have the responsibility, we need to keep each other informed on a daily basis about the life in the different classes and the activity in the subjects. When the week is over, it can be useful to have a place where we can refresh our memory and maybe find material for the documents to produce for the final assessment. Here the individual blogs may be useful...” Collecting data. To collect data on this experience we used: the blog content and usage logs, student observations, and a questionnaire distributed to the students after the end of the observation period. The combination of sources gives a rich set of information.
3. No doubts: a fiasco Usage of the blog. The students did not use the blog much during their practice. 12 of the 31 students that answered the questionnaire had been into the system to have a look, but only six of the students created any content. One of these just filled in some personal information, 3 made a test-entry, and one used the blog as a diary and added 5 entries in addition to one test-entry. The student helping us tried to start a discussion on his blog. We entered a message on the common blog to inform about this discussion, and this resulted in two comments. Patterns of usage of technology. In the questionnaire we asked students about their usage of various technologies. Most of the students (27) used the LMS during the week of takeover, though very seldom. Most of the students used SMS to get in contact with their peers during the week. However, only 4 students said they would consider posting SMS to a blog. E-mail was used by 18 students to contact their peers, and 15 students used telephone. Some students (12) stated that they use technologies less
frequently during the takeover to communicate to their peers due to geographical collocation. Access to computers in the school was limited. Patterns of cooperation. During the takeover students cooperated with different actors: all had guidance from their supervisors, most of them (23) collaborated with students from the same partnership that have the same subject, but other collaboration partners were also mentioned. Cooperation can be around different issues: subject matters (23), practicalities (27), experiences (26), and one’s own skill as a teacher (12). However, only 4 of the students had discussed with their peers the content of the practice summary they are supposed to write. Motivations. The students gave several reasons for their limited usage of the blog. Some did not feel the need for it, mainly because of their collocation; others mentioned the lack of time due to a heavy workload. The university LMS was also perceived as an obstacle. One student told us that it took time to get an overview of it and there was no time to spend on yet another system. Another one mentioned that it was hard to get an overview over all the provided information. Another system only added to the information overload. Some mentioned technical problems they had encountered or the lack of Internet connectivity. Several of the students believe the blog could be more useful when they are distributed in different schools, but they had no clear idea of how to use it. Logging of experiences. The students are supposed, as part of their final assessment, to write a report summarizing the practice period. Despite this, only one of the students used the blog as a diary: ” I use the blog to put down some thoughts about what I have experienced during the day… I note the same in my practice file, so why not let anybody else read it.”
4. Lessons learned After the takeover, we were left with an unused system, even if the system was potentially useful, as confirmed by the teaching staff, and usable, as demonstrated by the thousands of users of the selected publishing tool. Despite a shortage of time, we also felt that the system was properly introduced. The small technical problems are not enough to justify the fiasco. We therefore started a reflection process for understanding our experience. There is not only time. In blogs entries are organized in chronological order. This recalls a paper diary and it is an intuitive way to record one’s experiences. However time line is not enough. Learners should be able to rearrange the notes in their
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diaries in a flexible way to reflect their understanding. The entries are also generally unstructured. The blog should provide students with templates that can help them to structure the information that they record. Beware tradeoffs between accessibility and privacy. The strength of blogs resides in their capability of supporting sharing and commenting. However, uncontrolled accessibility can impact on students’ perceived freedom of expression. Limiting access, on the other hand, reduces the possibility to promote knowledge sharing at the community level. Mobility has different requirements. In our case students’ mobility was supported with the possibility to upload pictures and sending in SMS messages. This allows, while mobile, to collect fragments of information. There was however no support for students to view the content of the system, or know about changes, while mobile. This limited visibility of the system might negatively impact on its usage. Beware the social structures. There is a need to account for the complexity of the underlying social structures. When we designed our blogs, we only looked at community and individuals. This is not enough to support the rich collaboration patterns within learning processes in the field. The system should be designed to allow users to easily open or close their blogs to individuals or groups. Do one thing, and do it well. The objectives of the system should be presented by focusing as much as possible. Though blogs can be used in different ways, it is preferable to identify one specific need so to make clearer to students how and why to use the system. From our observations of students out in practice, we believe that blogs should be presented as a tool for recording and sharing experiences. Developing mental models of a technology requires time. Development of appropriate models is particular lengthy when, like in the case of blogs, this requires users to rethink their role with respect to the technology, from being a passive reader of information to an active information provider, and with respect to their community, from an individual learner to a coconstructors of a shared body of knowledge. Align teachers’ and students’ perspectives. When introducing a system it is important to verify that teachers’ and students’ expectations about the technology, but also about course objectives and learning process, are aligned. In our case, e.g., despite the importance of reflection has been strengthened by teachers, students were still not collecting enough information to later recall their experiences. In addition, the assessment criteria should be aligned with the learning process supported by the technology. In
our case the blog was supporting sharing, while the evaluation of students was done on an individual basis. Learning systems do not live in a vacuum. Students use a number of tools. While some systems can easily co-exist, such as email and phones, others seem to predominate, as the LMS. To be successful, systems must be introduced in an environment where they have the possibility to develop. Creating such an environment is mainly an institutional responsibility. If the overall context allows it, lightweight tools like blogs can then be introduced locally. This is empowering teachers and students, giving them the possibility to try out different solutions and dynamically find the ones that are suited to their specific needs. In the paper we presented our experience with the introduction of a blog to support learning in the field. We are aware that the acceptance of the system will change with time. However, by looking into this initial week we gained insights that might be useful in other situations. As part of our current work we are introducing blogs to support different forms of learning in the field.
Acknowledgements The authors thank Reidar M. Svendsen, Sobah A. Petersen, Alan Munro, and the PPE students for help and discussion. The work presented in this paper is supported by the NTNU-MOTUS2 project.
6. References 1. Dron, J., The Blog and the Borg: a Collective Approach to E-Learning. in World Conf. on E-Learning in Corp., Gov., Healthcare, & Higher Education, (2003), 440-443. 2. Higgins, C.J., Reeves, L. and Byrd, E., Interactive online journaling: a campus-wide implementation of blogging software. in 32nd annual ACM conference on User services, (Baltimore, MD, USA, 2004), ACM Press, 139-142. 3. Nardi, B.A., Schiano, D.J., Gumbrecht, M. and Swartz, L. Why we blog. Communications of the ACM, 47 (12). 41-46. 4. Price, S., Rogers, Y., Stanton, D. and Smith, H., A new conceptual framework for CSCL: Supporting diverse forms of reflection through multiple interactions. in CSCL'03, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 513-522. 5. Schön, D.A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, 1983.
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