Empirical Test of Blogging in the Classroom
The Higher Ed BlogCon 2006 ran throughout April and offered a variety of asynchronous webcasts about blogs and podcasts in higher education. I viewed a number of presentations and highly recommend them. I can't figure out how long the webcasts will be available, but I especially recommend checking out An Empirical Test of Blogging in the Classroom (23 minutes).
Nicole Ellison and Yuehua Wu in the Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media department at Michigan State did an interesting assessment of Nicole's use of blogs in her course. Their research questions centered around the effectiveness of blogs as compared to traditional papers in the classroom. I think their study offers some useful insights into how to use blogging well if you are having students keep their own blogs rather than reply to one centralized blog authored by the instructor.
For example, they discovered that students tended to spend less time on their blog assignments as compared to traditional paper assignments when they also had to post a comment to another student's blog during the same week. It seems the students might have perceived that the two-part blogging assignment was too time-intensive when it required developing their own post then commenting on another student's work. As a result, it might be better to split such tasks between two weeks -- one week have students post their own thoughts and the following week have them read other students and comment.
There are other useful ideas in the presentation as well.
Enjoy! Kim
Posted at
09:47AM May 03, 2006
by DUCKETT, KIMBERLY in General |