Category Archives: Technology in Pedagogy

Lunchtime Guide to Student Blogging

Technology in Pedagogy, No. 2, April 2011
Written by Kiruthika Ragupathi

Anand Ramchand, an Instructor from the Department of Information Systems shared his experience in getting his students to use blogs. He started the session with a brief introduction to blogs, explaining how blogs are a special instance of a website with a log of regular updates listed in reverse chronology, and the ease with which they can be published and accessed. He indicated the interaction in the form of comments differentiated blogs from other platforms.

 Blogs for Reflective Learning

In the year 2010, Anand used blogs as a tool to foster reflective learning in his students taking the freshmen module titled “Computing & Society”. The module’s primary focus was on the ethical, social and legal implications in the use of information technology. The objectives of this module were to get students (who are being educated in computing) to be sensitized to and evaluate the ethical issuses involved in technology design, development and use, and to get them to explore the world of IT as technology professionals rather than users.

Based on feedback from previous semesters, he understood that though students learn and become aware of issues related to ethics, they did not form deep and meaningful opinions about the issues. Hence to help his students get actively engaged in deeper thought processes, Anand identified the need for student reflection. He believed that would facilitate his students to draw out personal experiences and assumptions in evaluating ethical dilemmas.

He narrowed down to using blogs, in particular the Blog.NUS platform, after considering a range of tools that were available – concept maps, essays, discussion forums, and wikis. This NUS platform provided an official environment, setting clear boundaries within which students could blog and operate based on NUS IT policies.

His class had 170 students, and hence he resorted to group blogging with 3 to 4 students per group (a total of 44 groups). Each student in a group was required to make 4 posts at regular intervals during the semester. He assigned 10% of the grade to the group blog, and students’ contributions of comments on other blog posts were a component of their class participation score (which accounted for another 10% of their grades). Some groups’ posts spanned a wide umbrella of topics while other groups were more focused in their blogging. To jockey for visibility, groups also got creative, controversial and used various forms of multimedia in their blogs.

Pedagogical Advantages that Blogs Offer

Anand highlighted the following features that prompted him to use blogs for his module:

  1. Knowledge construction is aided with social interaction
    For students to develop knowledge, they need social interaction. Blogs permit collaboration, and allow students to debate and discuss issues positively, facilitating the social construction of knowledge. In case of forums, students tend to write their opinions and comments briefly, and sometimes only when prompted, while blogging allows students to create a more comprehensive commentary on a regular basis. The action of writing this commentary and subsequent interaction around it foster sense making and knowledge construction in students.
  2. Personal ownership over thoughts and understanding promotes better effort
    Blogs document students’ thought processes on how ideas connect and evolve over time and also facilitate the organisation of information into meaningful personal narratives. They give students the flexibility of deciding and forming their own writing style – on how information can be presented with images, pictures, and videos. Thus, students have ownership over their blog entries making it their intellectual property and this again  differentiates blogging from other tools like discussion forum which enables students to develop a sense of responsibility over the information they upload.
  3. Informality in blogs encourages engagement
    Blogging has some form of informality to it, unlike essays, and this informality allows students to comment on each other’s blogs, create their posts at their own time and pace. This gives students the opportunity to develop enough understanding of a concept before articulating it into text. Students become engaged not only in their writing, but also in their peers’ writing.
  4. Enhance writing and communication skills
    Making blog entries helped students to hone their writing and communication skills.

Thus, blogging can build a structure for reflective learning through knowledge creation and sharing and influences students to respond to thought provoking questions, reactions to photos and images, give opinions, discuss and debate on issues.

Take-home Lessons from the Blogging exercise

  • Keep up the momentum to encourage students to make better posts. This would require the instructors and tutors to read and comment regularly to provide the necessary feedback. 
     
  • Provide students with easy accessto the class blogs so they will read them. For example, provide:
    • a single list containing links to each individual student blog
    • an aggregated list of all blog posts made by all students (blog aggregate sites like NetVibes.com are helpful in achieving this)
    • an OPML file (a file containing a structured list of blogs) containing all the class blogs. If students are using blog readers (e.g. Google Reader), the OPML file allows them to ‘subscribe’ to all the class blogs in their reader quickly and easily.
  • Use face-to-face (F2F) lecture time to highlight exemplar blog entries, discuss good and bad posts, and provide guidelines and pointers to improve subsequent posts.
  • Use blogs as a source of student feedback, allowing them to guide the selection of discussion topics for class, and also to observe how students understand and apply concepts. Topics and examples that students blog on can be used in F2F classroom discussions, and this serves to further engage and encourage students.
  • Set up a good grading criteria
    To get students to reflect appropriately when writing their blog posts, guidelines need to be provided. This is dependent on the course and its objectives. Here is an example from Anand’s course on how students’ posts were categorised:

    • Relevant – a post containing information relevant to the course is the bare minimum;
    • Descriptive – the post describes a state of affairs well and is useful for other students to read;
    • Analytical – the post provides some analysis on a state of affairs and draws a logical, sound conclusion
    • Normative – a student is able to identify ethical principles, phenomena and values being affected by a state of affairs, evaluates the effects, and provides claims of good/bad and ethical justification;
    • Multi-Perspective – a student considers different/multiple perspectives involved before making ethical claims;
    • Engaged – a student is able to engage other students through subsequent discussions and demonstrate thorough involvement in the topic discussed
  • Use checkpoints to make sure that students do a progressive submission of blog entries at regular intervals during the semester.
  • Get students to use appropriate user identities (e.g. matriculation numbers or official email IDs, instead of nicknames) to help in identifying blog authors and commentators for grading.
  • Legal/copyright issues need to be explained to students.
  • Instructors to lead by example by writing blog entries that are exemplary and also start discussions on students’ blog entries.

In summary, Anand acknowledged that the exercise was a success as he was able to get his students to explore and engage in the world of IT more deeply than before. He also indicated that his students were involved in a more reflective thought processes. He was also happy that some of his students were continuing to engage their peers on their blogs even after the course ended.

Summary of the Discussion
A lively discussion followed the presentation, with participants offering suggestions on how they used blogs:

  • One participant suggested providing guidelines and word limits for the blog entries and comments, and to get students to provide both a ‘for’ and ‘against’ stance when commenting.
  • Another participant elaborated on how she and her team required each student to make a blog post as part of their CA assignment. Students were given ample preparation time with specific set of guidelines laid out. Her team assigned one tutor to grade all the blog posts made by the students of that class to account for fair grading and that was made easy with the set of guidelines. Other tutors/TAs posted constructive comments on each of the students’ blogs to encourage student discussion on the blog posts.
  • Few participants wondered if Facebook would be a more comfortable platform rather than blogs, while there were others who argued that they would not use Facebook. Those who wanted to use Facebook felt its proximity with students would be a plus factor. Those who objected felt that Facebook had particular drawbacks, being a third party application governed under US laws and with frequently changing privacy terms. Others added that material posted on Facebook by students was legally Facebook’s property and that one cannot be sure if materials deleted from Facebook are actually removed completely.

Q & A Session

Following the presentation, a lively discussion ensued and listed below are some questions from the subsequent Q & A session.

Q:  Normally when someone makes changes to a blog post, they normally just strikethrough. How do you deal with it? Do you have to save the previous version to check the changes made?
AR: For my class, my students did not use the strikethrough method but instead made changes in the Comments field. When the posts were edited, students marked the edited parts e.g. with a word ‘Edit’ or coloured in red font. 
Q: I use blogs to make status updates for a language class on German to improve their language skills. But sometimes some students make a number of updates (of bad quality) while others resort to the minimum requirement. How would you manage this?
AR: For our case, we use blogs to for students to give essay posts while your purpose was to use the German language more. Yes, I have students who are familiar with blogs that keep posting while those who are not familiar will stop at the minimum requirement. For a start, we gave suggestions on topics and comments on how entries could be improved by highlighting the good and bad posts. Some suggestions by other lecturers were to ask students to peer-review their classmates’ blog, or to get students to recommend a chosen post to be graded instead of grading all their writing. To help students in making quality posts, we should make sure the instructors and tutors are trained in providing consistent feedback to the students. 
Q: Do you give any guidelines on how to comments?
AR: No. We didn’t expect many students to comment on others’ posts, but they did. We thought the ones commenting will be tutors. To start, we highlighted good blog posts in lecture, and students would read them and begin commenting. The subsequent blog entries got better and better, as students commented on each other’s thoughts.  
Q: Last week, we had a workshop on Facebook. I think Facebook is similar but better. What are your views?
AR: The younger generation feels blogging is not so much in fashion. But they “blog” on Facebook often. We wanted this exercise to have a little more security and control, and to be within NUS’s official walls (rather than using an external blogging platform). NUS’s blogging platform inherently requires students to adhere to NUS’s IT policies, so they know there are already common guidelines in place for acceptable behavior and etiquette. 

Facebook for Teaching and Learning

Technology in Pedagogy, No. 1, April 2011
Written by Kiruthika Ragupathi

Over the years since its inception, Facebook (FB) has become the social network site of choice by University students. Selwyn (2007) describes how Facebook has become an integral part of the “behind the scenes” college experience. Singapore has 77.8% internet penetration and a high usage rate for Facebook.  

By using Facebook, instructors can take advantage of and use the student space, says Erik Mobrand, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.  He teaches on topics including the politics of development, social policy, popular culture and politics, and political finance. 

In the session, Dr Mobrand shared his experience with using Facebook in Honours modules over the past years and he suggested some ideas for getting started.

       fb-06apr2011-1     fb-06apr2011-3     

Collaboration in syllabus writing

In the year 2008, Dr Mobrand had the students in his seminar-style Honours module class on “Money and Politics” to prepare syllabus and readings for his class (Class size: 25 students). He gave a list of core readings and illustrative readings that is important for the class to get started.

Every week he got two students to lead the seminar rather than him hijacking the discussion. These students would then assign readings – video clips, images, journal articles, or papers – for the entire class and is shared with their peers. For this sharing and for enabling students to do the class work in their familiar space, he set up a Facebook group for his class. The group was a closed group and invited his students to join the group.

The results? He transformed his students from learners to teachers, which improve outcomes.  His students made connections between concepts in class and the real world with in the Facebook environment. The informality helped students to express themselves better and also broke down the boundaries – the academic and social boundaries.

Pedagogical advantages that Facebook offers

Dr Mobrand highlighted the following features that he liked and prompted him to explore using Facebook in his class:

    1. Engage students in a discussion

Dr Mobrand assigns two students to lead the discussion. These students post the relevant reading materials and puts down a description on their plan for the discussion. Students engage in the discussion before the face-to-face (F2F) class.  Dr Mobrand then takes a few minutes before each seminar to check the discussion on FB and this would enable him to take the discussion easily from FB into the F2F seminars. He also awards marks for student participation with a few percentage points.

    1. Allow students to easily post and view  video clips and pictures

Facebook allows for posting and sharing information with the ability to include notes, and upload videos and pictures. He realised that students found materials that they can easily relate to. This fosters student interactivity and creates student-generated content. Dr Mobrand indicated his liking of a clean and simple interface which allows for easy sharing as large percent of students are using it and will get their materials with a click within their space.

    1.  Bring the learning environment to students’ social space

Dr Mobrand felt that FB increases accessibility and breaks down false boundaries. He also sees that as he moves from the academic space like the IVLE to the social space, the need for students to move back and forth between academic and social becomes unnecessary. In the examples he showcased, he pointed out that most of his class discussions happened in the middle of the night. Hence breaking down the boundary between academic and social and moving into the social space of students makes it easy for him to capture their interest.

As students are socializing in their space, they come across interesting articles and will immediately post them for the class to read. Students can easily access FB on mobile devices, so using FB in the class allows them to participate in academic activities while on the move. Dr Mobrand felt that this would not happen if they were to post in academic spaces like the LMS. This informality helps students to express themselves better.

Summary of Feedback/Suggestions from the Discussion
Following the presentation by Dr Mobrand, a lively discussion followed touching on issues related to using social media in classes – both small and large classes, comparing using Facebook to the learning management systems or blogs, and forming ideas on how they could use Facebook in their classes.

  • When a participant wondered if it would be feasible to use FB for large classes, other participants proposed using tutorial groups to create individual FB groups. Then each tutorial group facilitated by a tutor could discuss their issues on their FB group. Finally, a class FB group could then be used to post the summary of the individual FB discussions. This will then allow the instructor and the class to view post before a F2F class discussion.
  • Some participants using blogs felt that they could supplement their blogs with FB groups for sharing of information as blogs act more as a platform for reflection and is expository while FB is not.
  • One participant said that he would try using FB during classes, to enable the shy students in his class to participate.
  • Others suggested using it upload video presentation of students and allow students to review their peer’s presentation.

Finally, it was acknowledged that students are using FB for academic purposes on their own. Dr Mobrand noticed that students were holding a mock diplomatic meeting in another colleague’s class using FB groups for coordinating within their team. This was something that students had done on their own without any instruction from the lecturer. It goes to show that many students see FB as a natural way of communicating with their peers on academic matters even if instructors do not command them to do so. Hence, it is clear that students are already using FB for learning purposes and so it is important for instructors to exploit it to the benefit of both the teachers and students.

Q & A Session

Following the presentation by Dr Mobrand, a lively discussion ensued and listed below are some questions from the subsequent Q & A session.

Q:  As learning becomes socialized, will students get distracted? Will the quality of learning get affected?
EM: Facebook is a distraction. But, I favour distraction and want them to be distracted and we are actually taking advantage of that distraction. Instead of showing videos to their friends, they can become distracted with our class happenings.
Q: How do you mark student participation?
EM: I mark student participation in FB similar to that of participation during in-class discussions. I generally look for the quality of the responses – looking for students who express interestingly and the frequency at which such interesting responses are posted. 
Q: Do you restrict the length of the posts or comments?
EM: No. I do not set a limit to the comments and posts. As for the length of the comments, lengthy discussions are quite common in F2F class discussions; students do give lengthy responses and if we don’t encourage those, students would stop participating.  So, the same would apply here as well. But in general, good comments are concise. 
Q: How much do you control the discussions in FB?
EM: I am okay if the discussion goes slightly off the topic but I will intervene when that happens too much. In the early days, when interesting debates came up, I used to intervene, get involved in the participation and offer my comment. Once I wrote my comments, the discussion usually would die down soon.  After that experience, I slowed down on commenting immediately. However, I read the comments and pick out useful things that are important and bring them into the classroom for F2F discussion. 
Q: How often do you initiate a discussion?
EM: Usually the two students leading the discussion that week will initiate the discussion and the discussion happens until the F2F seminar is held, after which it slowly sizzles out.
Q: How long do you keep the comments? Do you showcase good comments/posts?
EM: I keep some comments for my own reference and clean them up from time to time. However, I have never tried showcasing good comments for future use.  But we do a great deal of discussion on comments and posts. 
Q: How different is the discussion from using chat and discussion in IVLE?
EM: Similar but this environment is more receptive and attractive as it is trendier among students. IVLE appears to be more of an academic platform for students. Using discussions in an LMS environment is moving students into the locked-down mode which removes the very openness and the ease in usage while in FB. 
Q: How much additional work is required to use Facebook?
EM: Thinks it requires less time and work. The time taken Is for me to read the comments before class. But it is time well spent, as it gives me more sense of students’ understanding and allows me to prepare for class. This gives me a good idea of their understanding of the reading posted and does not require to guess on what is working and what isn’t. 
Q: What are some problems that you have encountered?
EM: What’s gone wrong – I did not face any huge problems. But I have heard from colleagues in secondary schools that students write inappropriate comments. And recently it has also been reported in the newspapers that students may get confused and post personal comments into the FB group.
Q: Did you encounter resistance from your students? Did they feel it was an invasion of their privacy?
EM: Students did not think it was an invasion of privacy as I allowed them to create fake account specific for the class.

We sincerely welcome your feedback on this session and new ideas on how you have used or would use Facebook for academic purposes.