By Peter Oehlkers
Communications Department

Peter Oehlkers, Communications Department

“What have you learned this semester from your classmates? Not from me, or the text–your classmates?”

I ask this question at the end of every semester in my online global communications class. I am usually heartened and sometimes humbled by the responses. Students will not only praise the open-mindedness and diversity of opinion among their classmates but will point to specific things they had never considered that a fellow student brought to their attention (and some go so far as to assert that MOST of what they learned came from their classmates). I am convinced that this is linked to a specific tool I use in the class—a group blog.

Let me explain. Although robust face-to-face seminar class may well have the same result, online discussion assignments, by requiring and enforcing participation, can draw a wider set of voices into the conversation (particularly students who defer to other more talkative students in face-to-face settings). The blog takes this one step further, asking students to find, discuss, and link to relevant content on the web—and then allowing other students to comment on what has been posted.

I am not going to claim that the group blog assignment is good for everyone or every class, or even that I have figured out how to use it perfectly. I will say, though, that for this particular class it has worked well to support a powerful kind of collaborative learning and to make students more comfortable in the world of “Web 2.0.”

For those who are interested doing something similar, I offer the following suggestions and cautions.

1) I suggest you use a free service such as Blogger or WordPress. I highly recommend a group blog that you administer yourself rather than having each student create their own blog.  This can be a bit of an administrative headache—each student needs to sign up for an account and then you need to “invite” them to participate in the blog—but it is well worth the control over content that you get (—a misplaced “.com” substituted for a “.org” in an entry can spell disaster if it’s not identified before publishing).

2) Because the blog is “out there” on the web, you also need to be concerned about student privacy. Students should be discouraged from using their real names (this has FERPA implications—it is against the law for us to publicly disclose student enrollment in a college class without the student’s consent). Students should also be discouraged from disclosing any information that might provide clues to their identity, e.g., talk about employers or internships (particularly those with non-disclosure agreements). If such talk is inevitable, you should retreat behind the walls of Blackboard where there is a workable, albeit artificial, blogging tool.

3) Make sure to allow and encourage comments. Without some evidence of readership, blogging can feel like an empty enterprise. I would suggest, though, that you use Blogger or WordPress settings to moderate comments from “non-members.” It can be thrilling for students to find they are being read by people in the “real world” but you need to be wary of “comment spam.” Importantly, while you, the instructor, might post and comment early on to model behavior for students, I recommend limiting your direct contributions to the blog—students should take ownership. While I constantly monitor the blog, by the end of the semester I usually find myself intervening only when conversations take inappropriate turns.

4) Finally, students are not necessarily as tech-savvy as we assume. While I have not had much trouble with “netiquette” violations, most of my students come to the blog with no idea how to post a simple web link. You may need to offer explicit (even face-to-face) instruction on very basic technological issues.

In summary, I have been very pleased how the group blog assignment has worked to foster collaborative learning in my global communications class. Beyond that, it offers students access, in a relatively protected way, to the growing world of Web 2.0 and social media. Precisely because it is not hidden behind the walls of a course management system, students can feel like they are contributing to the total amount of knowledge available on the Internet, not just an individual class. And this, I hope, will encourage their further participation in this great knowledge production enterprise.

This article is part of ASpect’s February 2009 issue, The Cutting Edge in Research and Teaching.