A Case for Blogging as a Classroom

I recently watched a video entitled, "Empowering Engagement with Blogs," which details the benefits of harnessing blogs as an effective way to cultivate dialogue and community around college class material. Created by Christopher P. Long, Penn State University Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy in the College of the Liberal Arts, the video outlines Long's unique approach to replace all of his class' traditional writing assignments (with the exception of the final research paper) with blog post and discussion assignments.

Empowering Engagement with Blogs



As described in the video, after testing numerous approaches, Long's established a single blog format, which allowed the co-authoring of a single fluid document, or, "blogging as a class." Although allowing students to blog on their own provided students with a little more privacy in submitting their work, as Long describes, aggregating the content from individual blogs was problematic because it didn't generate the dialogical dimension of back-and-forth discussion like a dedicated classroom blog.

Aside from describing how he tweaked his curriculum to include blog-centric assignments, what's most interesting is how Professor Long and a few of his students outline some of the main benefits of blog-centric assignments and discussion.

Cultivating Community Through Dialogue

• By giving students an equal voice, the blog became an effective extension of the classroom, where dialogue could continue regardless of class time constraints and content discussions could be revisited at any point and time. For the students in Long's class, the blog became more than just another college assignment or activity. The assignments gave every student a voice regarding the source material and the active conversations continually provided "something to look forward to" rather than just another assignment to turn in and never revisit again. By continuing dialogue, Professor Long created a constructive community where students were willing and eager to help each other understand particularly complex course concepts and simply get to know each other's personalities on another level.

Measuring Engagement with Outcomes

• Professor Long established his own way of measuring engagement among students by making clear distinctions between particular types of post assignments. While some posts could be brief, one-off comments, other posts required more substantive and organized responses and the comments were held to the same standards of detail to cultivate continued dialogue. Although Professor Long didn't go into too much detail as to how he implemented rubrics and achieved measurable outcomes, it's clear that students' writing skills and comments were held to particularly high standards.

Connecting Across Institutions

• Due to Professor Long's choice to keep the blog public and open to a degree, students from other institutions outside of Professor Long's class were given the ability to read and comment on posts. As one student stated from the video, he experienced a "moment of epiphany" after realizing that potentially anyone on the internet could read his writing. This spirit of openness led to a wider community of readers and participants, and provided transparency between curriculum and the learning efforts of students at other institutions.

More Thorough Analysis' of Material

• Considering blogs enabled students to prolong and easily revisit discussions, Professor Long witnessed how students increased their overall understanding of course material concepts in addition to uncovering new themes in the material and taking unique and unanticipated standpoints in particular conversations.

Extension of the Learning Lifecycle

• Perhaps one of the most prolific benefits of Professor Long's blog-centric curriculum is the "continued use" of the blog among students. For the participants in the video, as classes ended and the grades were given, students could continue taking part in academic discussions and stay in touch with the members of a social community that they helped to build without really knowing it.
  

Ultimately, discussing these benefits raises the question, "How have other educators created similar communities for their own classes and curriculum?" Do other subjects lend themselves to the use of particular collaborative learning tools?

We'd like to hear from educators: Based on the subject that you teach, have you created your own learning communities online? What collaborative technology did you use to accomplish this?