An Educational Blog about Blogs for Education

This is the first website I have ever made. Further, this is the first blog I have ever begun. It's purpose is to explore a few different educational technologies as part of a class on my path towards a Masters in Physics with emphasis on education. This class, appropriately named Introduction to Educational Technologies, will have us explore 4 technologies that can be utilized for instruction, with blogs being the first. And thus, here we are: a blog about blogs.

Blog comes from the shortening of Web-Log (a phrase that is not particularly long anyway) and traditionally refers to a log of entries made through a website. These blogs can take varying forms, but are typically diary-like entries with some expectation of regular, routine creation schedules. As these blogs are often reflections on learning and personal engagement with the material, they afford the student expression and the ability to take ownership of their learning. Students writing blogs are creating content that can be seen by others and accessed later on and this naturally gives students this ownership. For the instructor, blogs offer a look into the understanding of the student as well as the interest and engagement. Because of their diary-like nature, blogs naturally result in students supplying stream-of-thought style responses which give instructors deeper insight into the student's attachment to the material. They also encourage students to tie new entries with old ones as they progress, thereby strengthening connections within the material and enhancing learning. These affordances are what make blogs a useful technology in any classroom. Before going further, we should differentiate blog from some other, similar technologies including glogs, vlogs, podcasts, and discussion boards. All of which utilize web connections and multimedia to produce similar effects, but with slightly different media. Traditionally, blogs would be an exclusively written log, while a vlog would be a video log, a glog would be a poster/visual log, and a podcast an audio log. Modern sites, however allow multimedia to be seamlessly integrated into the written blog and thus blog can also refer to a more amorphous category. As such, I want to emphasize the benefit of the posting of the content rather than the type of content. Discussion boards can be similar to blogs, but are more community driven, with learning fostered through discussion and collaboration rather than individual engagement. Blogs (and logs) afford the student individuality that discussion boards often do not. Another aspect of the blog to consider, and a way that it differs from other technologies, is the necessity of a website to host the blog. This means that the instructor can choose to have students create their own individual websites (furthering the ownership, engagement, and expression), have students use one common class site for their individual blogs (fostering communication, collaboration, and community), or simply have students create blogs on a public website. While researching this assignment, I discovered a few resources to create a website to host blogs (either individual student sites or a class site), these included wordpress.com, wix.com, and weebly.com. Wordpress seemed to require more computer knowledge than I currently possess, including information on creating databases and SQL, but weebly and wix both seemed very approachable and could be picked up relatively quickly by instructors or students alike. (Wix is the service I chose for this project, as I had some previous experience with it before). These sites would allow for students to explore not only blogs, but also website creation, an important professional skill for students to learn. If building your own website is intimidating or unrealistic for you, however, there is also medium.com, a public website that allows blogs to be posted onto it. There are likely other educational and ethical considerations to be made by using a public website like this, however. For my own field, Physics education, I will provide two examples of plans to utilize blogs. Firstly, blogs as a enhancement of typical science journals. Throughout the year, students are expected to maintain some written record of the labs they have completed and their results/reflections from these labs. The specific learning objective states that students should "communicate valid conclusions supported by the data through various methods such as lab reports, labeled drawings, graphic organizers, journals, summaries, oral reports, and technology-based reports". This lends itself well to blogs as students can easily take what would have been written on pencil and paper into a much more collaborative environment. Students can not only write these reports, but also use them as actual communication, sharing their blogs with classmates to discuss and compare, ultimately improving their own scientific writing in the process. Because of the blog's (and potentially the hosting website's) affordance to allow the student expression, students can learn how to communicate scientifically while also taking ownership of the knowledge and their own learning. Secondly, blogs as a tool for transforming connections physics learning. As mentioned above, blogs can be used to connect new learning to old learning. Physics is often split into two parts, in the first part we explore motion, forces, energy, and momentum while the second part explores electric forces, magnetism, electric circuits, and light. Students often do not easily make the connections between the topics in the second part even though they are direct results of the concepts discussed in the first part, despite using the same words such as force and energy. The blog allows individual entries to be referenced or linked and can allow students to organically connect these topics. As part of a lesson on electric potential energy, I would like to have students re-examine blog posts previously made on energy in physics 1 and draw connections. Students could then write direct responses to their previous selves to address any misconceptions they may have held during the first post or any ways that their new knowledge has reinforced what they wrote originally. This is an ability that is only afforded due to the web-based nature of blogs. The web is called that because of its ability to interconnect different pages and content. Using blogs in this way allows us to connect student knowledge in ways that would not be allowed without this technology, transforming the instruction. There are obstacles to utilizing blogs in the classroom, however, and most notably is the lack of access. This is not as noticeable for blogs as it is for other technologies, as blogs can largely be accessed from any computer with internet, however I did run across some more demanding programs, such as wordpress, that may be more difficult to approach for some. And as always, time is one of the biggest obstacles for all educators. Blogs require some time upfront to teach the student how to use the technology as well as their expectations in their writings and submissions, but they also require a significant amount of time to fairly and accurately assess. If students feel that the blog is not being appreciated by the instructor, they may not take it seriously, further undermining the tool, however proper attention to each student's submissions is a very taxing and time consuming task. Overall, blogs are a great tool for allowing students to take pride in their work and learning while giving them to ability to share with others, but without equal input and dedication from the instructor these advantages may not be seen by the students.