Exploring students’ understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education (2007) Kerawalla, Minocha, Conole, Kirkup, Schencks and Sclater.
Based on this research blogging is very clearly NOT of interest to the majority of students, NOR is it likely to be of value to them for collaborative learning. There may be value in blogging for your own sake - aggregating content in one place.
(Research on using blogging with students of Public Relations gives a far more favourable response ... I would suspect that this would apply to courses on journalism and creative writing i.e. use the medium that is appropriate for those on specific courses).
This is a study of OU students. A more promisng, and appropriate study I am looking at concerns PR students who a) need to develop their writing skills b) need to understand what blogging is all about.
The greatest value I have got from this self-inflicted exercise is to deconstruct the research that was undertaken should I wish to undertake research of this ilk myself. Can I fault the research?
What do you think?
| Problem | Does blogging support student in their learning or not? Are educators perceptions of the positive uses of blogging for learning borne out by the perceptions of and uses of blogging by students? |
| Questions | QQ Designed to ascertain their level of experience of blogs and to gather their opinions about how blogs (and other tools) could support their learning. The research questions we sought to answer were as follows: 1) What degree of blogging experience do students have? 2) Do students want to have blogging as part of their course? 3) In what ways do students think blogging is (not) a useful learning tool? 4) Is there a disparity between what course designers think blogging is useful for, or would like blogging to be used for, and students’ opinions of usefulness? |
| Setting | Online students at the OU Survey of 795 student and course designers |
| Authors | ‘Enthusiastic’ OU IETT Academics |
| Previous research | O’Reilly 2005, Sade 2007, Weller 2007 - literature search, previous research … |
| Concepts/theories | |
| Methods | Qualitative - explorative/iterative rather than set All questions required students to select their response by clicking on a radio button, (e.g. ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or Likert scales such as ‘not at all’, ‘slightly’, ‘in-between/no opinion’, fairly’, or ‘very much’). (Kerawalla et al. p. 6. 2007) + an open question for expanded thoughts. Interviews with course designers - Interview questions were designed to address the following areas: the rationale for introducing blogs, whether blog content would be assessed, whether blogging was compulsory, uptake levels and whether there were any plans to evaluate the success of blogging activities. - extract, collate and compare. Quantitative Analysis - The survey generated both quantitative and qualitative data. SPSS Analysis Manual coding of responses Coding of responses |
| Findings |
i.e. Not everything they’re cracked up to be. Krause (2004) reports haphazard contributions to blogs by his students, minimal communication between them, and found that posts demonstrated poor quality reflection upon the course materials. Williams and Jacobs (2004) introduced blogs to MBA students and although he reports overall success, he encountered problems with poor compliance as, for example 33% of the students thought they had nothing valuable to say in their blog. Homik and Melis (2006) report only minimal compliance to meet assessment requirements and that students stopped blogging at the end of their course. Other issues include:
It appears that the ideals of educators can be difficult to implement in practice. (Kerawalla et al. p. 5. 2007) |
| Paradigms | A cultural psychological approach to our research that proposes that learning is a social activity that is situated and mediated by tools that fundamentally shape the nature of that activity (e.g. Cole, 1996, Wertsch, 1991 and Vygotsky, 1979). |
| Limitations | Expectations about sharing, enthusiasm for the genre …definition of blog (see e-portfolio and wiki), journalism …. hard to define (Boyd, 2006). They mean different things to different people. Uses to collate resources (portfolio) (Huann, John and Yuen, 2005) , share materials and opinions .. (Williams and Jacobs, 2004). |
| Implications | Guidelines, informs design |
- 53.3% of students had read a blog
- only 8% of students had their own blog
- 17.3% had commented on other people’s blogs
- 23% of students thought that the commenting feature on blogs is ‘slightly’ or ‘not at all’ useful,
- 42% had ‘no opinion’
- 35% thought that commenting is ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ useful.
- only 18% said that they thought blogs would be ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ useful.
- of those who blog only 205 of these thought blogs would be ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ useful.
Students were asked ‘how much would you like to use a blog provided by the OU as part of your studies?’
35% ‘not at all’
13% said ‘slightly’
34% had ‘no opinion’,
12% said ‘fairly’
6% responded ‘very much’
Students were asked ‘how much would you like to use a blog provided by the OU for personal use?’.
52.6% said ‘not at all’
8.7% said ‘slightly’
28.3% had ‘no opinion’
8% said ‘fairly’
2.7% responded ‘very much’.
Chi-square analyses
Examination of the observed and expected frequencies for this data suggests that in both cases, there is a relationship between not seeing a role for blogs and not wanting greater use of conferencing.
Supporting findings that when given a choice between classroom based learning or e-learning those who have a choice are equally satisfied by what they get.
All of the positive responses refer to the students’ own (potential) study blog. (Kerawalla et al. p. 7 2007) Others use their blog as a repository. Few saw the benefits of linking or using a blog to for reflection and developing ideas.
Responses to the question ‘would you like a blog provided by the OU to support your studies?’ reveal that there is a profound lack of enthusiasm (from 82% of the sample) for blogging as part of courses.
Later this year, we plan to explore PhD blogs. This variety and combination of methods will enable us to gather different perspectives and to triangulate our findings. (Kerawalla et al. p. 7 2007)
REFERENCE
Cole, M. (1996) Cultural Psychology. Camb. Mass: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kerawalla, Lucinda; Minocha, Shailey; Conole, Grainne; Kirkup, Gill; Schencks, Mat and Sclater, Niall (2007). Exploring students’ understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. In: ALT-C 2007: Beyond Control: Association of Learning Technologies Conference, 4-6 September 2007, Nottingham, UK.
Vygotsky, (1979) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. M. Cole M, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman (eds and trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, J (1991) A sociocultural approach to socially shared cognition. In L.Resnick, J. Levine and S. Teasley (eds), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Washington: American Psychological Association.