Last Friday I was fortunate to sit in on a seminar given by a fellow University of Hong Kong professor Daniel Churchill. He is in the Faculty of Education's Division of I&T Studies and his work focuses specifically on the use of new technologies in education.
Daniel was nominated for an EduBlog Best Teacher Blog award, primarily for his class blog, Interactive Representations of Information and Knowledge. He said that the student work in that particular class was of unusually high quality. He also said that the same class brought him the best student evaluations in his teaching career at HKU. While it's hard to claim definitive cause and effect with just one class, he's pretty sure there's a strong connection. A class devoted to creating online objects certainly seems compatible with blogging, which also helps. It's possible that some kinds of courses lend themselves to blogging better than others. He said he thought that the fact that students were posting their work publicly and sharing it with each other easily online probably motivated them to work harder on their projects. He also pointed out that blogging helped to generate extra ideas and learning experiences that weren't necessarily planned from the outset, but which greatly enhanced the class. A further description of his presentation and his powerpoint slides - including results of a student survey about the blogging experience - can be downloaded here.
An educator in the room asked Daniel about the impact that blogging has had on his own workload. Daniel made an important point: it's not realistic to approach blogging as an add-on on top of all the other things you normally do in your class. Blogging should be part of a complete re-think in terms of how you organize your own work and that of your students. (I was thinking as he replied that we might have a similar response to a question about blogging's impact on the workload of a professional journalist...)
The lecture gave me a lot of good ideas for my own class, New Media Workshop, which naturally has a blog - and for which my students will be blogging among other things. I gave my first lecture this morning and am looking forward to working interactively with some very bright and engaged young people. My class blog is on a Wordpress multiuser "blogfarm" set up for faculty and staff at our Journalism & Media Studies Center, courtesy of Boris Anthony, the Global Voices web guru (thanks Boris!). Several other faculty are planning to use blogs in their classes as well. We'll all be using them differently, as we're all teaching different things and have very different kinds of assignments. It's going to be fun to see how things evolve, and how the use of blogs impacts the experience of our journalism students.
Oh and by the way, if you think you might be interested in joining our faculty, click here. And if you're interested in applying for our Masters in Journalism program, click here. Deadlines for both are approaching!
Comments