Learner Blogging-A Way For Students to Find Their Own Feet

[Lesley Ann Wallace]

The beauty of learner blogs in higher education is that they stand for the gaining of knowledge quintessence in each individual student; it’s solely owned, it’s a one-way monologue or voice that can be shared with the rest of the learning community and the world, if need be. Yet, with the importance of ownership, others can comment, but cannot contribute to or change the initial shared idea in anyway.

Dually significant is that many instructors acknowledge with using student blogs in their coursework, students’ responses become public, in and of itself, making the students more aware in improving the quality of their course work.

Most exciting is that learner blogging also gives students a new sense for confidently exposing or publishing their ideas to the rest of the world.

There are three good guidelines for including Blogging in your instructional design.

1.CONTEXT- two effective strategies are to one, have students post an assignment to a blog that is a response in some way, or two, give a weekly or timely topic for them to respond to.

2.BLOGGING EXPECTATIONS- When assigning blogging tasks, remember, that blogging is a reflection activity meant to convey a deep level of comprehension, so think about your over all learning outcomes for the course, not just your objectives, make room for reflective responses. A good way to do this is concentrating on Bloom’s Taxonomy-
Expressive statements (self positioning-evaluation about content)
Commentary statements (analysis)
New idea statements (synthesis)
Real life relevance statements (application)

3.GRADING- Set timelines for responses and use a simple and informal rubric that lets students visualize what you want in their written ideas. You can do this easily by thinking about your reflection objective from #2.

(Adapted from, Halavais, 2004 and Reynard, 2008)