What Faculty Want to Know

What is a blog?

A blog (or “Web log”) is a personal electronic journal created with the help of software that is often freely available. A blog gives individuals the power to perform many functions that traditionally fell under the purview of academic publishing houses:

Publication and Wide Dissemination of Personal Commentary

• New entries are published to the Web quickly and easily
• Limits can be placed on who may read the blog, but most blogs are, by definition, open to the public (and will appear, therefore, in Internet search results)
• Entries are organized in reverse-chronological order
• Entries are automatically archived
• Each individual entry (or “post”) is assigned a unique URL (called a “permalink”)
• Beyond text, blogs can also include audio and video

Citation Index for Tracking Personal Influence

Blogging systems like Movable Type include a “trackback” feature that turns every blog into a citation index. Bloggers can use trackbacks to monitor how influential they are in the blogosphere by requesting notifications each time someone else refers and links back to one of their blog posts.

Peer Review

Thanks to the built-in commenting feature in many blogging systems, a reader can respond directly to an author’s entry, posting his or her critique to the author’s blog page. Responses are displayed below the relevant entry in reverse-chronological order.

Knowledge Gathering, Classification, and Management

• RSS (Rich Site Summary/Real Simple Syndication) is a feature built into most blogging software that makes it possible for readers to subscribe to the content created on a particular blog. This way, instead of having to visit the blog itself to check on new entries, subscribers receive notice of new blog content. RSS features allow a learning community, for example, to keep track of new entries by its members and monitor “feeds” of interest throughout the larger blogosphere using so-called RSS aggregators or news-feed collectors. In courses, educators can keep tabs on student blogs by subscribing to their RSS feeds and checking their aggregators regularly.
• Blog publishing platforms typically offer customizable metadata schemes for tagging content by keywords. By hosting their own blogging services and integrating blogging software systems with bookmarking and digital photo management systems, institutions can provide faculty, staff, and students with an intriguing community-based knowledge management tool.

Will my work increase if I assign blogging in my courses?

Training students to use blogging applications is extremely simple, since most programs come with ready-made layouts and allow both writers and commentators to enter plain text into Web-based forms. Blogging requires minimal additional work, particularly compared with how cumbersome Web page creation was just a few years ago.

Grading student blogs should take no more time than grading any written assignment. Key to effective assessment is developing a well-defined rubric or set of criteria to address content and format and communicating those expectations to students.

No longer distracted by technical challenges, faculty and learners can concentrate on pedagogical and subject-specific issues. The amount of time that a faculty member devotes to integrating blogging into a course is a matter of choice. Often there are obvious uses for blogging, particularly in those courses that emphasize writing, reflection, and peer review. If they are willing to devote more time to class preparation, instructors can design authentic learning experiences around case-based scenarios and sustained investigations, in which blogging plays the same role that it would in real-world practice: facilitating collaboration and collective knowledge construction.

How do I evaluate a student blog?

Those who have experimented with course blogs suggest that students be required to post to their blogs at regular intervals, determined by the instructor, ensuring that participation remains consistent throughout the semester. As with any assignment, student participation in a class blogging exercise should be judged in relation to the original learning objectives associated with the activity. What do you hope to achieve by asking your students to blog?

• Content mastery
• Reflective thinking
• Practice in argumentation
• Research-skills development
• Team-based learning
• Peer review

Once you have defined the key purpose of blogging in the overall course design, determine what you hope to assess, and define measures of success. For example, if you are using blogs to help students master course content, you might assess student work according to certain criteria—organization of thought, analysis of materials, selection and annotation of resource links, usefulness of feedback to peers, and so on. For a more extensive treatment of assessment issues, see “How do I know it works?” in this guide.

How are other instructors using blogs in their courses?

The potential instructional uses for blogs are almost infinitely varied. Reinforced through cases and examples in the “What are others doing?” section, here are a few approaches to consider:

• Teaching the process of peer-based evaluation: Instructors in English composition programs are using blogging tools to teach their students how to critique one another’s work effectively. Students post works-in-progress to their individual blogs, and their classmates are invited to offer constructive feedback.
• Fostering discussion through a single “class blog”: Instructors are often dissatisfied with e-mail and forums as conduits for online group discussion because of the “lurking” factor: while most students read e-mail messages and forum posts, few respond to them in any meaningful way. But students cannot “lurk” when entire discussions appear within a single, persistent “class blog,” and each person’s level of participation is apparent to all. Moreover, writing under their own names, students tend to take more ownership of their commentary while strengthening their reading and writing skills.
• Developing the finer points: In lieu of weekly response papers to theoretical articles, instructors can assign each student an individual blog where each can tease out the finer points of theoretical discussion.
• Promoting community: This is particularly important for students in clinical practica who “meet” exclusively online and need to tell their fellows about the experiences they are having at their respective internship sites.
• Extending learning beyond scheduled course time: Blogs can help instructors address student needs before class meetings, offer just-in-time instruction, provide additional thoughts that relate to class material, discuss professional readings, and model authentic professional writing activities they want students to practice in their blogs.
• Simulating real-world practices: For those disciplines where blogging has become a fixture of authentic practice—journalism or media studies, for example—blogs can be used to advance role-playing simulations. At the University of Arizona, a history instructor incorporated blogs into a Middle East simulation scenario in which 65 students assigned roles as contemporary actors in the region were asked to vie for the attention of media outlets. Three students represented media outlets based on the real Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Al-Manar Arabic-language regional satellite television channels. The students maintained media blogs that updated all players with “news” during the simulation, with each blog reflecting its own political spin and posting updated reports at least twice a week. Players focused on getting publicity on the blogs and pushing their own agenda through press conferences and issued statements.

Will the process of blogging actually change the way students think and express their ideas?

Owing to the nature of the blogging process itself, students can develop particular habits of expression and organization that will serve them well in the 21st-century workplace:

Used with permission of Alec Riedl, University of Tennessee

• Focused expression: Since the native parlance of the blog is the short “post,” which is time-stamped, archived, and assigned a permanent URL, users become comfortable (often adept) at creating focused miniessays—small, self-contained units addressing a specific topic.
• Participatory learning and multitasking: Since blog entries offering personal impressions of an event can be written and published while that event is occurring, blogging can change the dynamics of a lecture or conference. Blog audience members grow accustomed to dividing their attention between three tasks: experiencing the event, publishing their impressions of it, and reading/responding to the impressions of other bloggers.
• Pattern recognition: Web publishing systems that allow bloggers to create hyperlinks, perform searches, and develop customized metadata schemes introduce them to tagging, taxonomy, annotation, and other research skills designed to elaborate, organize, and integrate patterns of meaning over time.
• Mixed-media conversation: Depending on the particular blogging platform and the user’s production skills, written expression can be supplemented with audio recordings, images, video clips, and any other Web-deliverable digital content, underscoring the mixed media quality of 21st-century conversation. Moreover, through the automatic syndication capabilities included in most blogging systems, users can subscribe to one another’s blogs, monitor new postings on particular topics and themes, and feed that information back into their own reflections, creating a collaborative learning project in the process.

What will happen to self-expression if blogging becomes a graded activity?

Many longtime bloggers have questioned the very idea of assigning this form of Web-based self-publishing as a graded activity. By definition, they contend, the blog must be a voluntary and self-motivated pursuit. Instructors, they suggest, will rob the exercise of its pleasure and purpose the moment they make it compulsory.

Even if an instructor encourages her students to adopt blogging as a purely voluntary means of self-expression related to the course materials, certain precautions may need to be followed that could have a chilling effect on participation and engagement. There is always the delicate matter in student journaling of how much personal information students should be invited to share either with the instructor alone or with the class as a whole. Even when access to student blogs is strictly controlled—limited, let’s say, to all students registered in a specific course—protection of student privacy through the use of pseudonyms and self-censorship may defeat the purpose of the exercise if not handled with proper sensitivity.

Is there any advantage in keeping student blogs open to the public?

Some would argue that keeping blogs open to the public is vital to the medium. It could even produce an occasion for serendipitous connections forged between a student and a leading scholar in the field. A student who posts a critique of an assigned class reading may hear directly from the article’s author if he happens to monitor online references to his work. Such a moment links the learner with an authentic professional world of passionate debate that lies beyond the classroom. However, there are important privacy and legal issues to consider before asking students to put their thoughts and reflections into the public domain.

What about the institution’s responsibility to protect student privacy?

Faculty may be concerned about the legal issues surrounding the publication of student information through blogs. Students can be expected to share their personally identifiable coursework with other students as a condition of enrolling in the course. Therefore, if the blogging space is unique to a particular course and secured for students enrolled in that course, students have no “right to anonymity.” However, things get complicated when students are expected to submit their postings to a public site in a personally identifiable way.

In light of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), institutions would do well to consult with their legal counsel concerning the questions raised by public blogging spaces and other public electronic environments. FERPA requires that an institution—and, by extension, its employees—obtain a student’s permission before distributing any aspect of the “education record” (which includes coursework) beyond the immediate course environment.  If a course is required for graduation, the instructor may be violating FERPA by insisting that students submit their work to a public site—giving up a privacy right—as a condition of enrollment.

The safest solution for educational institutions might be to ensure that instructors establish a secure blogging space unique to their particular course. Even in this secure environment, instructors might choose to take additional precautions to protect student privacy by asking class members to use pseudonyms, submitting their work with an anonymous alias known only to the student and instructor. In addition, students should be cautioned to remove any other personal identifying information from their blog postings.

FERPA legislation does not explicitly address these and other questions involving emerging technologies. For this reason, it is important that institutions seek the advice of their legal counsel on student privacy policies and emerging technologies.

Am I legally responsible for what my students write in their blogs?

Many institutions are adopting policies for faculty and staff that basically tell employees to blog at their own risk because they are legally responsible for their commentary and that the college or university will not indemnify an employee for anything he or she writes on a blog, regardless of whether the blog is hosted on the institution’s servers or not. The extent to which a faculty member might be held personally liable for comments published by a student as a result of a class assignment is not yet known. Once again, these legal issues should be taken up with your university attorney.

What if I want to manage my course with the help of blogs?

Dissatisfied with how difficult course management systems make it for students to actively participate in the shaping of course discussion, some faculty have begun to use blogging systems to manage their courses. Those who have experimented with this arrangement are looking forward to a time when blog-based online learning is wedded to the course management system. In the best of all possible worlds, students could comment on, react to, and debate any element contributed by anyone else in the course, while educators could perform all the bookkeeping chores involved in running a course, keeping students apprised of class expectations and upcoming events and protecting privacy (if necessary) with the aid of password protection—all within a tightly integrated environment.

How do I get started with my own academic blog?

Faculty need to experiment with these Web publishing systems on their own to discover promising new instructional uses for the new medium. Instructors may be able to turn to their institutions for support in aggregating RSS feeds and starting blogs of their own. If the campus does not provide a hosted service, instructors can be directed to one of the free online services as a first step. They can be up and running in just minutes with Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), the best known of the free services; opt for an expanded range of options and tools at mo'time (http://www.motime.com) or tBlog (http://tblog.com); or test a more powerful system by registering for a free personal license to use Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org) or TypePad (http://www.typepad.com). A list of free online services is available in the section “Where can I learn more?”

How do I give all the students in my course their own blog accounts?

Many early faculty adopters have simply chosen one of the online services that host personal blogs for free and asked their students to open their own accounts. We have already discussed some of the pedagogical, administrative, and legal issues that may make this option less than desirable.

In order to take advantage of the full-featured commenting and content management features offered by commercial hosting services, many instructors are asking their institutions to purchase site licenses from Movable Type, Manila (http://manila.userland.com), or one of the other Web publishing service providers that allow institutions to build hundreds of multimedia blog sites at educational discounts.

Finally, because institutions are concerned about entrusting their course-based educational materials to third-party servers, there is a growing trend among colleges and universities to run licensed commercial systems on campus servers or develop their own Web publishing systems internally. Depending on the size of that institution’s available server space, a college or university can create and maintain thousands of blogs for its campus community.

Are other colleges and universities offering their campuses centralized service to help users create personal, educational, or administrative blogs?

College and university units are beginning to host robust blogging services for credentialed members of their academic communities:

Larger view

• University of Minnesota Libraries (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/): UThink is a hosting service based on the blogging software Movable Type; the service is integrated with the University of Minnesota campus architecture so that faculty, students, and staff can access their blogs using their university network identifier and password.
• University of Warwick (http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/): Warwick Blogs refers to the community of blogs at the university, all hosted on the campus blogging system (based on the university-developed “blogbuilders” software). The system uses existing university credentials and has been integrated with the campus single sign-on system. Nearly 40 departments are participating in the blog system to date, with individual blogs being listed under the owner’s name or department affiliation in the Warwick blog directory.
• Case Western Reserve University (http://blog.case.edu/): Blogs@Case uses Movable Type, which the university has integrated with del.icio.us online bookmarks manager (allowing users to display their bookmarks on their blogs) and Flickr, an online digital photo management system, transforming the blog into a manageable photo album, if desired.