Both Chris Sessums, Guidelines for Blogging, and Kele Fleming, Blogging Guidelines, have reported Anne Davis’s entry on her ‘Edublogs Insights’ Guidelines for blogging. Both Chris and Kele have emphasised the implications for writing reflectively in Anne’s guidelines, which is precisely what we want to encourage with our students. We want them to own and be in control of their blogs but at the same time we want to guide them towards using their blogs as a reflective learning tool (as well as anything else they might want to use them for) so that their blogs develop some of the uses and processes of e-portfolios.
To kick-start my own efforts to put some ideas together I have modified some of Anne’s list. These are all suggestions that relate to their studies and interests and are geared to promoting reflection upon their learning and the construction of ideas and knowledge by sharing and discussing them with others.
Blog entries you write can have a number of purposes and aims. They can be:
- Your thoughts about what you are learning, what you understand and don’t understand, how it extends or contradicts what you already know and understood, what questions still need to be answered, what needs further clarification or what still needs to be demonstrated for you to be convinced.
- Making connections to your learning by exploring what others have written about it on the web
- Contributing your ideas on how particular modules could be restructured or modified in some way to have you excited about and believing that you will actually use the information you have acquired and it is relevant to your life. What’s relevant to you and what and why do you need or want to learn?
- Strive to improve your writing and take risks with expressing your ideas and bouncing those ideas off of a much larger audience
- Developing a distinct voice for communicating and discussing ideas - your ideas, your thoughts, your take on things, your enthusiasms and interests
- Expressing your opinion but backing it up with well thought out reasons
- Learning to collaborate in the development of ideas by expressing ideas, sharing information and resources, commenting on other’s entries and responding to comments made on your blog entries.
- Asking questions and raising issues that will make a reader think and want to comment.
All suggestions welcome!
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