Blogging students

In my research so far I have heard how teachers that have incorporated blogs into their courses often anticipate the blogs to be taken off by students without any prior participation of the lecturer's behalf. Lecturers in this way set up the blog and tell students to go blog. According to my participants the blogs, for this reason they suggest, never really take off.

On a similar note, my participants furthermore say that blogs within education only seem to materialise if students get marks or are assessed in how well or much they participate in the creation of the blog

This seems to be supported by research already done on blogging in education. Williams and Jacobs report on how two university blogs were highly successful, even though they report that students were not given any direction in how to use the blog other than logging in and to write on their subject matter for the course they were taking. Participation was optional but students were told that for considerable participation in the blog they would receive five marks included in their assessment for the course.

So, maybe the Williams and Jacobs study is a sign of the times that still seems to linger - that students simply need to be directed toward a blogging facility and the blog would take off. However, as noted above, the reason for the success of the aforementioned blogs seems to be that students participated for marks - not simply because they wanted to.

Educational blogging seems, in this way, to clash with the original concept of blogging - at least to some of my participants - the concept behind the blog being that people participate because they want to.

Some of my participants are furthermore critical towards this idea of forced blogging. Where students are directed to blog on a particular subject under the specific conditions of academic assessment.

There are also the classic issues of control of content and access, the idea of privacy and last but certainly not least the feeling many of my participants described as that of "being watched", i.e. that students see what you are writing and vice versa, lecturers and librarians see what students are writing. Many generally seem to have reservations about the idea in that way.

These are interesting issues, especially when academics do generally seem to want to be part of web or library 2.0. I wonder if any of this might lie at the heart of why universities and libraries find it difficult to engage with blogging in the first place.