Carol Cooper a teacher from NZ Lincoln University from Canterbury New Zealand . Her research was also conducted with Lyn Boddington covering an ethical case study on the use of blogs in course work. Of interest the course happened to be on an HR subjects within 2nd year business management, any interesting perspective given some previous reports that 70% of HR people did not know what a blog was.
Why did they use a blog? They were inspired by Tom Smith at Ultralab South to enable learning, interaction between students and collaborative learning.
They put the proposal to the ethics committee and got the following response back :-
- What is a blog
- Had to have ability to have response to psychological harm
- Students had to have options on which assessment they could do, ie they needed to option not to blog
Started using Blogger last year, now they are looking to move to Moodle as a blog component will be in the nest version.
They used Will Richardson’s video on blogs as an intro to blogs, along with some hands on sessions.
Lots of little teething issues around Blogger, on a side note some of the issues I had with Blogger hence my move to WordPress.
Really positive feedback on the collaboration aspect and the influence on team interactions. Students had “other doors” opened up in doing the work, therefore it is a positive experience and will be continued.
Some issues were around the informal nature of the posts and citations, but I wonder is this then trying to put a square peg in a round hole? This was something that Gavin found (the next paper presented but posted out of order) and this year is using blogs to support the collaborative nature of his course,
Michael Specht 