My experience of being a follower of blogs is reasonably deep, my experience with blogging is virtually nil; so, I looked forward to play-testing blogs as an educational technology. Being a constructivist science teacher plying my trade in a high school, my pedagogy is all about creating an environment for students to stimulate and pursue their curiosity through experiences that allow them to construct their own knowledge. I believe that two important elements of students constructing their own knowledge involve socialization with their peers during the process and the development and use of language with a unique personal voice. My pedagogy also has a unique twist in that I am a practitioner of ASU Modeling Instruction which puts a heavy emphasis on connecting to and challenging students' existing schema, or more simply put their mental models of how the world works, in order to facilitate students improving their existing schema as well as generating new schema. Of course, my content is primarily the world as seen through the eyes of a physical scientist, but I also value the opportunities to help students develop "21st century skills" like observation, critical thinking, and argument.
As I began play-testing blogs, I very quickly came to the realization that there are two fundamental approaches to using blogs - as "a blogger" and as "a blog follower". Having primarily been "a blog follower" up until recently, I feel I have head a head-start on play-testing from this perspective. What is apparent to me, and what has attracted me to following blogs, is that they are an excellent way to pursue information about some topic of curiosity. Following the blog of an institution or an individual may have differing levels of professionalism, but the common theme is blogs usually have a unique perspective that is shared through a particular voice. The information shared is usually themed, but is shared in modest doses whose connectivity is established in the mind of the blogger. This veritable smorgasbord of ideas is effectively offered as an a la carte menu, with the sincerest efforts to make everything on the menu look appetizing, but the blog follower has the ability to select which intellectual morsels they wish to dine upon and which they do not.
When I look at students being positioned as "blog followers", I find blogs to be primarily a passive educational technology. From the perspective of the SAMR model, I think this makes "following blogs" at least augmentation, but definitely more enhancement than transformation. Still as a science teacher, I can see the value of blogging for my students as an affordance to my students to provide access to additional content, but also as a way to model my own curiosity, observation, and schema through the material I chose to blog about and the connections I choose to make. Yes, there are myriad ways to use a blog to extend classroom conversations from my side and possibly stimulate the curiosity of some students, but I have many ways, both in and out of the classroom, to do this that would require more investment and interaction on the part of the students. Therefore from the TPACK model perspective, I view "following blogs" as a conjunction of mostly content with technology, with a small foray in the direction of pedagogy.
The other fundamental approach to blogs, the students as "bloggers" feels like a potentially more fruitful way to make use of blogs as an educational technology. My feelings about this stem from a number of affordances I see in using blogs in this manner - a blog offers a student choice about nearly every aspect of the voice they use to express themselves; a blog is a space for a student to actively, creatively develop and document their own ideas, schema, and express their personal voice; a blog has myriad tools that allow expressing ideas and making connections in many different ways that span a wide range of personal styles and cultural orientations; a blog is built up from small increments of contributed posts into a larger work, avoiding overwhelming the student; a blog resides in and interacts with the whole of the internet making resources readily available; and a blog acts a memory, tracing the development of student ideas as a documented and ongoing activity.
One example of a student's ability to choose a "voice" to express themselves is the vlog, where the student may choose to connect to the voice of another as I do when posting a Veritasium vlog about the universe, or the student may choose to create a vlog of their own. Another example is a student expressing explicit connections through graphics as when I post a glog from Glogster about the solar system. These are only the tip of the iceberg on the ways for a student to give "voice" to their ideas, show connections, and effectively reveal their schema, including use of images, file attachments, and hyperlinks.
From the perspective of the SAMR model, students as "bloggers" definitely is transformational use of educational technology. At an entry point, the student is likely experiencing modification, but as a student's comfort and skills with the technology grow, the redefinition level is easily within reach. From the perspective of the TPACK model, I feel there is an opportunity for excellent overlap of my pedagogy, the technology, and the content. My pedagogy is supported by blogs creating an environment for students to stimulate and pursue their own curiosity, while making connections to and modifying their schema, and ultimately expressing their ideas in their own personal voice. The content is also readily accessible through a blog's interface with the internet. The internet is also an excellent fount of physical science content for the discerning user.
One area of weakness of the students as "bloggers" approach is that blogs are largely a very personal medium, which is great for establishing a personal voice, but leaves somewhat fallow my pedagogical aims to develop student knowledge through socialization. This is not to say blogs are not social in nature, certainly the student is sharing their work products and ideas with many other students, but largely in a one-directional manner from the student to their followers. Certainly a student blogger can construct ways to receive feedback on their posts, including "likes" and comments, but this falls short of the dialogue possible in other media such as discussion boards. As a student blogger becomes more sophisticated in the use of the technology, they can even establish follower profiles that allow followers to effectively contribute their own material connected to the theme of the blogger, establishing a type of dialogue, but this is unlikely to be a realistic starting point for my students. I also wonder about the blog as an intermediary of their ideas, which does allow a student to share their ideas to physically remote followers, but possibly leading to some sort of less-than-healthy, disembodiment of the student from the social context of their peers.
With the above caveat in mind, I would like to introduce my students to becoming bloggers. The trick will be finding a platform that minimizes the technical challenges while playing upon all the advantageous affordances mentioned above. I suspect that this will need to be a gradual process with a considerable amount of scaffolding at the outset, possible using tools like Glogster to seed the process. I am also convinced that I must actively blog to provide a model for my students. Certainly one of my overarching aims will be to use the student's blog and its ability to store their contributions, over time, as a way to stimulate reflection on their own developmental journey. One impish notion I have is that this longitudinal view may not be limited to a single semester or year in a course, but may span, at least, their high school career; this would mean introducing blogs to freshmen. Another impish notion is that there is an opportunity to cultivate cross-disciplinary integration, mathematics and science are obvious candidates, but my ambitions are much greater than this given physical sciences deal with how the universe works and the universe is where all the disciplines ultimately operate.
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