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License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) Attribution: What is a Blogby Edublogs
Instructional designers should be aware of theoretical and practical issues relating to tools for engagement in online courses and or blended courses. When designing courses and recommending tools for engagement, always keep the learner’s perspective in mind…
Learning Objectives
- Engage learners with course content and with their peers.
- Develop online learner communities.
- Vary modes of participation.
The Learner’s Perspective
In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner’s mind (shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment is asked to look at things as they are, without preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from learners’ perspectives is to see things the way new students do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks that they might face, a task that takes on added significance in light of the relative newness of online education. Online education acts as a universal solvent, dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have taken for granted. Lynn Kirkland Harvey’s observations about online identities are important to keep in mind because the theme of online identity is one to which we often refer.
Engagement with Blogs
The blogging boom shows little sign of abating, and it is not surprising that more and more educators are showing an interest in using blogs for educational purposes. In this section, we give a brief overview of blogs and what makes them work. We will assume in the bulk of the section that you will be helping your students set up individual blogs, which we would recommend in most cases.
We feel that blogs are very flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of contexts and users. We recommend that educators wishing to take things further also take a look at the section following this one on wikis, which shows how a class with a solid foundation in blogging might profit from using this more collaborative tool.
What Are Blogs?
For the purposes of this section, we will use the following definition of a blog, (which appeared in a 1999 Salon.com column) “Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom.” (Rosenberg, 1999, para. 6).
The name weblog, now generally shortened to blog, is a portmanteau suggesting a logbook that is available through the Web. It is an outgrowth of programmers’ logs in which actions are recorded in chronological order to help with troubleshooting and debugging. A variation of this practice involves programmers, often working in teams whose members are located in different time zones, themsel