ALDinHE 2012 CONFERENCE REFLECTIVE BLOGGING A-F Dujardin, Sheffield Hallam University

Outline 1. Talking point: case study based on practice 2. Three key concepts 1. Reflection 2. Blogging 3. Community 3. Socio-technical concerns 1. Blog settings 2. Pedagogy 4. Digital literacies

Workshop blog Share your views

Hand-out MotivatorsBarriersEnablers 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? MotivatorsBarriersEnablers Design Topic relevancePrivacy Cultural factors (‘face’, modesty) Training Task briefing Support Reciprocity Emotional support Social capital Vulnerability Seeding the blog Trust Comments Examples Assessment Sociability as criterion ScholarlinessClear criteria Formative f/back

Three key concepts BloggingReflectionCommunity

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 SettingsPedagogy

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 spaceCommunity 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 (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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