Blogging Case Study: Middlebury College

Rationale

Barbara Ganley has been writing a personal blog for many years (http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/) and has been using blogs as the online complement to her courses for several terms. Based on her experience, she saw blogs as a good tool for encouraging student reflection and discourse in her first-year seminar Exploring Contemporary Ireland through Writing and Film.

Description

Barbara Ganley teaches in the English department at Middlebury College (http://www.middlebury.edu/) in Vermont. Ganley expects her students to be adept at expressing themselves and critiquing others through their writing by the time they complete her course. Blogs have proven to be an ideal tool to teach these skills, and Ganley uses them for the online communication in her courses. The blogs supplement face-to-face activities and avoid the limitations that traditional learning management system discussion forums place on organizing and sharing individual student posts.

Ganley promotes “slow blogging,” which takes inspiration from the Slow Food movement. She encourages her students to avoid rushing, taking the time to craft thoughtful and deep posts. She compares the practice of creating blog entries to the academic tradition of writing scholarly letters to colleagues. What emerges is an environment in which students are able to learn to reflect on, critique, and debate ideas related to the course. By using blogs to read, write, and comment on topics related to the course, students are able to create an exquisitely detailed record of the class.

Ganley uses blogging in Exploring Contemporary Ireland through Writing and Film, a course in which she challenges her students to become familiar with alternative media for expression. Just as the course uses multiple types of contemporary media to explore Ireland, Ganley encourages her students to experiment with expressing themselves through a variety of media, including pictures, sounds, and even digital stories and post these creations on their blogs.

Using their blogs, students explore and document their topic of interest by collecting appropriate links and referencing them in their posts. Ganley encourages students to build upon referenced works by stating opinions, finding opposing viewpoints, and exposing the context around them.

For part of their final grades, Ganley gives her students the opportunity to help decide how they should be evaluated. Rubrics are collectively developed to help determine effective and appropriate use of blogs as tools to improve writing. Students are asked to reflect on what excellence means for them and what it would take to achieve it. At the end of term, students formally defend the flaws and strengths of their work and argue for their final grade.

Implementation

Middlebury College uses the Movable Type environment for blogging. Participants in the class attend a workshop in the first week of class to learn the environment and then set up their own blogs. Students are also given permission to post on the class blog, or “mother blog.” The mother blog serves as the primary information source for the class. In the center section of the blog screen, a collaborative space is available for all class participants, including Ganley, to post insights and reflections. In the left margin are links to the syllabus and other administrative information. The right margin contains a blogroll, or list of links, to all the student blogs.

The Middlebury College IT unit runs the freely available Movable Type software on its servers. In addition to the first-week workshop to learn the environment, students have access to Tech Tutors for help. Tech Tutors are students trained by the IT department to answer questions ranging from basic to advanced queries about movie-editing tools like Flash and Final Cut Pro. Movable Type supports the use of rich media in blog posts, giving students many ways to express themselves.

The blogs are publicly accessible and, once indexed, appear in results from standard Web search engines. If they attract the attention of the blogosphere, timely or insightful blog posts have the potential to generate a lot of traffic. The blogs also remain available on the Internet after the semester ends. With some blogs incorporating images, sound, and moving pictures, ongoing hardware and bandwidth costs may require a review of this practice.

Impact on Teaching and Learning

Larger View

For Ganley, blogs enable and promote public writing. By openly sharing thoughts, critiques, and questions on their blogs, students get the experience of asking questions and giving critiques in front of their peers. Through written responses to peers posts, students practice written discourse in which others can observe or participate. Ganley guides the students through the writing and critiquing process by actively modeling through entries on her own blog and by leaving comments on student blogs.

The public nature of the class writing also permits students to participate in the blogosphere as contributors as well as consumers. By referencing, commenting on, or just linking, students and teacher can bring materials from elsewhere into the class. These reflections can in turn be referenced by others. Archives from previous years’ classes often serve as essential reading for current students. The choice of using public blogs emphasizes the principle of openly sharing content and gives students insight into the possibilities of the types of discourse possible through Web 2.0 tools.

Finally, the incorporation of a variety of media in addition to writing provides students with the experience to critically evaluate a wider range of modern expression than they might be exposed to elsewhere. Through experimentation with different media and shared reflection, students gain experience with the promise of additional ways of communicating meaning.

Reflection

Ganley uses her blog to emphasize the academic values she expects students to acquire in her class. In addition to being able to think critically, communicate, and critique, Ganley’s students take responsibility for their learning. The use of blogs pushes students to develop new practices and provides the experience to begin to critique new tools.

While Ganley remains a strong personal supporter of blogging and the practices embedded in it, she is more interested in ensuring that her students are engaged and take responsibility for their learning. For Ganley, blogs are simply the tool used to achieve this. Ganley gets great satisfaction when students demonstrate they can actively participate in public discourse with confidence.

Through their use at Middlebury, blogs help Ganley model good practices and showcase essential skills. Blogs are used to critique, argue, and ultimately defend thinking. They are also used to fit student writing into the context of existing thought by linking to existing resources and references on the Internet. With blogs, students gain experience participating in and contributing back to the blogosphere.