ALDinHE 2012 CONFERENCEREFLECTIVE BLOGGINGA-F Dujardin, Sheffield Hallam University

Outline

1. Talking point: case study based on practice

2. Three key concepts1. Reflection2. Blogging3. Community

3. Socio-technical concerns1. Blog settings2. Pedagogy

4. Digital literacies

http://aldinhereflectiveblogging.wordpress.com/

Workshop blog

Share your views

Hand-out

Motivators

Barriers Enablers

Design

Support

Assessment

(Adapted from Ardichvili 2008)

Context

Mature e-learners

Professional people

Reflection on practice as a way of pooling experience

Digital immigrants?

What factors could influence blog use?

Motivators

Barriers Enablers

Design Topic relevance Privacy Cultural factors (‘face’, modesty)

Training Task briefing

Support ReciprocityEmotional support

Social capitalVulnerability

Seeding the blogTrustComments Examples

Assessment Sociability as criterion

Scholarliness Clear criteriaFormative f/back

Three key concepts

Blogging

Reflection

Community

What is a blog?

Subjective annotations to the Web (Mortensen and Walker 2002)

The blog concept is about three things: frequency, brevity and personality (Williams 2001)

A tool for interpersonal communication and mass communication (Bortree 2005)

Reflection

Kolb

Cycle

Schön (1995)

Reflection as mechanism for professional development

Moon (1999, 2010)

Map of the process

Role of dialogue with peers

Role of emotion

Reflective writing

A form of mental processing … that we use to fulfil a purpose or to achieve an anticipated outcome … applied to relatively complicated or unstructured ideas …largely based on the further processing of knowledge and understanding and possibly emotions that we already possess

Community

Community of practice

Lave and Wenger (1991)

Wenger (1998, 2000)

Virtual community

Rheingold (1994)

Preece (2000)

Virtual community of practice

Ardichvili (2008)

An activity system about which participants share understanding about what they are doing and what it means in their lives

Cultural aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions… to form webs of personal relationships

Socio-technical concerns

Settings Pedagogy

Blog settings (1)

Private vs public?

Settings (2): sharing blog posts

Settings (3)

Metaphor of the diary

Privacy? Usability of

looking at peers’ blogs

Metaphor of the community

Vulnerability vs feedback

Usability: all posts visible

Personal space Community space

Pedagogy

Authenticity of the reflective task(s) Connection to practice Peers’ role: a ‘real’

audience Tutor support

‘seeding the community’

Modelling posts and responses

Formative feedback ‘Like’

Assessment Can reflection be

assessed? High / medium / low

stakes A demanding task

Reconsider ‘usual’ practice

Criteria Reflection

(Hattie and Smith 1995) Connection Sociability (Preece 2000)

Digital literacies

Access Skills

Practices Identity

(Sharpe and Beetham 2010)

Conclusion

Supports a pedagogy for the network society Participation Personalisation Productivity (McLoughlin and Lee 2008)

Confidence and competence in a core Web 2.0 skills (employability)

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