Blogging to Learn
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UnBoxed: online [ Current Issue ]
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Blogging to Learn
Spencer Pforsich
High Tech High -
a blog
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could be used as a tool for reflecting on academic research or a medium for peer critique.
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The thoughts we read on the students’ blogs revealed an important development: they were not only reading, but were also responding to, each other’s blogs. That meant that students could learn from each other by looking to their peers’ blogs for possible research sources and by initiating a dialogue about those sources. A student might post a small annotation about a website he had found, and another student studying a similar topic could use this information to locate new sources, focus his or her research, and contribute to the evolving dialogue. Mejias describes this process as distributed research—whereby “knowledge is collectively constructed and shared” (2006, p.1). In this way, the blog is a tool not only for recording what students learn, but also for students to share newfound information with their peers and to construct knowledge together.
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My blog can serve as a tool for my own learning, to reflect on and investigate questions in my own practice; it can also, I hope, be a tool for teaching other practitioners about strategies and resources that have worked for me.
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he traditional conceptualization of teaching as a private practice, where teachers work in isolation from one another (Nespor 1997), comes into question when we think about publicizing what we do.
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blogs hold us to a standard higher than ourselves by encouraging collaboration between teachers, but without the tensions that can sometimes result from face-to-face collegial feedback (see Johnson & Donaldson, 2007 for further discussion of these tensions).
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effectiveness of the blogs was to pick out exemplary posts to share with the class. We would read the posts together and tease out what elements made them successful, keeping a list as we went of all the things they could replicate later.
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By showing my students the process of developing ideas—such as projects, as seen here—I give them a glimpse into the rationale of my teaching practice. I also allow them to see me falter in working out difficult problems, which lets them know that this is a natural part of work worth doing. If they see that even adults struggle with new ideas, then perhaps their own struggles will feel more like a natural part of the learning process.
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