Can Blogging Make a Difference?

When Michigan State University doctoral student Todd Ide needed a research topic for a large-scale study required for his Ph.D., he looked at the classes he was teaching in his role as a graduate assistant. He wondered if there was a meaningful way to incorporate Web 2.0 into his curriculum for “Reading and Responding to Children’s Literature.” He reviewed current literature about blogging in education and saw an opportunity to further the research.

Formal studies about incorporating blogs into curricula were minimal, and what was out there was more anecdotal in nature, said Ide. “Most other studies reflected what the researcher’s experience was and what they believed the students took from the experience,” said Ide. “What I found lacking was research that examined blogging’s effectiveness from the student perspective. There was little discussion of student perceptions concerning the value of blogging as an activity or whether the students believed blogging impacted their learning.”

Ide began with a pilot study in 2009, which sought to answer three main questions:

• Does participating in a blog help reinforce learning that is done in the classroom by extending these conversations outside the confines of class hours?
• Do students believe that participating in a blog was valuable to their learning and understanding of key course concepts?
• Do students view the blog as a positive addition to their course learning or as another obstacle or requirement to be completed?

Another goal was to offer insights to instructors as to how to incorporate blogging in a way that is beneficial to students. “Most educators use technology for administrative tasks rather than instruction because they don’t feel prepared and aren’t getting the technical support needed. The results of the study, I believed, could help suggest best practices for using blogs as learning tools.”

Nature of the Blog
While there are certainly plenty of other Web 2.0 communications media from which he could have chosen, Ide decided to study blogging because it combines solitary thought and social interaction to engage students and reinforce learning. The theory is that blogging increases collaboration, helps students transform and refine their ideas owing to the reflective and interactive nature, and improves critical thinking. Blogging disrupts and transforms, said Ide. In addition, blogs, these days, take very little time for a teacher to set up. “The ease of blogging with new tools such as Wordpress and Medium and the fact they are hosted and are free to use, also make it easier to get started,” said Ide.

Another reason Ide chose blogs as the topic of his research is that blog posts are accessible to a large global audience. According to Ide, blog search companyTechnorati reported more than 133 million blogs in existence, and there are currently 346 million people globally reading the 900,000 blog entries that are posted every 24 hours.

“The numbers are not consistent,” he said, “but it’s explosive, and it’s trending vertically. This means that blogging allows students to publish their thoughts and ideas in a public venue that potentially has a worldwide audience. This public exposure should lead to students being even more reflective and thoughtful about their posts and comments, because anyone and everyone around the world can view what they write.”

To Find Out
Eight out of 25 students in Ide’s “Reading and Responding to Children’s Literature” class volunteered to participate in the study. Ide set up the blog before the semester began. “We used Blogger mainly because it’s free and fairly intuitive when learning how to use it,” he said. “Students were given author access so they could create posts and comments.”