Blogs op universiteiten

Jeremy B Williams van Universitas 21 Global en Joanne Jacobs van Queensland University of Technology
schrijven in een artikel in het Australasian Journal of Educational
Technology (2004, nr. 20) over hun onderzoek “Exploring the use of
blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector”. Hier een
samenvatting van hun belangrijkste onderzoeksresultaten.

Over blogs en wiki’s
“Others might point to the fact that online collaborative workspace in
the form of ‘wiki’ predated any developments in the blogosphere. Wiki,
a piece of server software that permits users to freely create and edit
web content via any browser, supports hyperlinks and has a simple text
syntax for creating new pages. The first ever wiki site was created for
the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995, a site that now hosts tens of
thousands of pages. Since this time, wiki has enjoyed varying degrees
of success, partly due to variability in users’ collective enthusiasm
for creating content. Blogs, on the other hand, boast a level of
participation not previously experienced by the earlier wiki
initiative, and a greater sense of community and debate is encouraged
as a consequence.”

Over blogs en hun verschijningsvormen
“Blog pundit John Hiler has described the blog as ‘the latest disruptive
technology’, the ‘killer app’ that has the capacity to engage people in
collaborative activity, knowledge sharing, reflection and debate, where
complex and expensive technology has failed (Hiler, 2003). Indeed, the
great beauty of blogs is their versatility. They cater for a wide
diversity of interests and uses and there is no rule that states a blog
has to be owned and operated by an individual. There are group blogs,
family blogs, community blogs, and corporate blogs, and then there are
blogs defined by their content; eg. ‘WarBlogs’ (a product of the Iraq
War), ‘LibLogs’ (library bogs), and ‘EduBlogs’, a new type of blog that
has begun to emerge in educational circles.”

Over blogs en de sleutel van de populariteit
“The key to the popularity of blogs, it seems, is the scope for
interactivity. While, initially, a blog may be treated by its
maintainer as little more than a ‘news space’, it is not uncommon, over
a period of time, for a distinctive style to emerge, in the course of
writing entries and responding to feedback, that reflects the personal
character of the blog’s creator. Significantly, rather than alienate a
readership by exposing one’s personal traits and idiosyncrasies, this
adds to the very popularity of a blog. As Jacobs (pdf) explains, this is part
and parcel of the theatre of interpersonal communication, played out to
an undefined, virtually infinite public space. Indeed, this
‘exhibitionistic behaviour is encouraged, supported and even sought’ by
the ‘cyber-voyeurs’ of this theatre; viz. ‘the readers of blogs, who
post comments in reply to entries, often positively reinforcing the
opinions of the blogger, but sometimes disagreeing on points of
philosophy, politics or social comment, and occasionally ‘flaming’ the
blogger for opinions expressed’ (Jacobs, 2003, p. 2).”

Over blogs en kennismanagement
“The simplicity of the mechanism of blogging as a public space for
comment and information dissemination has also attracted the interest
of the business community, culminating in the first international
conference on the business use of blogs in the United States in June
2003, and in the development of commercially hosted blogging spaces
such as the Socialtext initiative. Bausch, Haughey & Hourihan
(2002) argue that while formal knowledge management tools are
complicated to implement and may be deemed an imposition on the time of
a worker, informal systems such as blogs provide an opportunity to
capture knowledge where it is created in an organisation, sharing that
knowledge throughout an organisation.”

Over blogs en leren
“As a knowledge management tool, blogs provide the potential for
relatively undifferentiated articles of information passing through an
organisation to be contextualised in a manner that adds value, thus
generating ‘knowledge’ from mere ‘information’. Comments systems and
democratic posting privileges allow employees in an organisation to
give voice to ideas and provide feedback on procedures in a manner not
previously possible in a distributed office environment. Further,
personalised responses to news and messages are a simple means of
developing an understanding of the collective knowledge of an
organisation and a means of broadening that knowledge, thus creating
‘intelligence’ from ‘knowledge’ (see P�r & Molloy 2000, pdf). Thus, in a
business context, blogs provide a forum for learning. It logically
follows therefore, that the experience of collective knowledge
generation can and should be applied to traditional educational
environments.”

Over blogs op universiteiten
In het artikel komen onder meer University of Iowa, Rice University en
Harvard University voorbij als voorbeelden van univeriteiten waar
gewerkt wordt met blogs. Uitgebreid wordt stilgestaan bij het
initiatief van de Brisbane Graduate School of Business (BGSB) van de
Queensland
University of Technology (QUT) en hun experimententen met ‘a group MBA
blog’. In een vijftal tabellen worden de belangrijkste resultaten
gepresenteerd van een onderzoek dat onder 51 studenten (50% respons) is
uitgevoerd.

Samenvatting en conclusie
“Students have long learned as much from each other as they have from an
instructor or a textbook – it’s just a question of finding an
appropriate vehicle for facilitating this learning. The ‘cut and
thrust’ of the MBA classroom has performed such a function for many
years and will likely continue to do so for some time to come, but the
blog provides another such forum, one that successive generations of
students will feel increasingly comfortable with, as it becomes more
commonplace for people to engage with one another online rather than on
campus. (Indeed, some might argue that we have already gone past this
point.) In short, blogs have the potential, at least, to be a truly
transformational technology in that they provide students with a high
level of autonomy while simultaneously providing opportunity for
greater interaction with peers. A blogging tool would be a valuable
addition, therefore, to any learning management system (LMS).”

Het artikel “Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector” is zowel in pdf als html te bekijken.

Meer over blogs in het onderwijs via Weblogs op school, Weblogs en Wiki’s in het onderwijs, Video weblogs in het klaslokaal, Bloggend leren: weblogs in het hoger onderwijs en natuurlijk bij ICT en Onderwijs BLOG.

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