Recently in talking to a few profs who have been looking at using blogs or portfolios in their own courses, they said that they heard from other instructors that the “magic” that blogs and eportfolios are supposed to bring to the class, just hasn’t happened. The students don’t care about them. They think they are “lame” at best or on the whole, a waste of time. Hearing this, I thought… this must be just the squeaky wheels that are being heard, but then over the weekend and right around 7k of my run this morning (remember to donate to my walk 😉 ), it came to me… the reason why these tools are not working, or at least seeming to show something different or useful to the instructors involved, is because these tools are being used in an echo chamber. Certainly that can be a good use for some (younger students or cohort groups), but generally, these tools are meant to be shared across a wider swath of people and be focused on the needs of the individual, not a course. These tools also usually only appeal to a certain type of person – one that already collects “IP” type artifacts, and to get others to buy in is a very difficult task indeed.
Knowing this, using these tools to focus exclusively on the content of your class is certainly going to be a hard sell for students in most classes. But if that is what you want to do, there are several CMS modules that will help students organize their reflections on the content of the course. This course blogs, while technically a blog in pretty much any way you want to look at it on the surface, I would call them real blogs. They’re just a journal that can be done in any number of ways, but just has the “latest and greatest” name tacked onto it. If a student has no passion for the content, then why would they want to reflect. And marks do not provide passion, sorry to say.
ePortfolios, the other part of this post are a real land mine when it comes to single course use. Why would students care to organize their discussions and assignments for use after the class? This is something that certainly can be useful inside a single course as long as the assessment of the collected artifacts is thought about before the ePortfolio is foisted on the students. If an instructor wants students to really buy into this type of assignment in a field that doesn’t know about ePortfolios to begin with, there should be a way to connect the course artifacts with what else the student is going to need later on to show future grad advisors or employers.
Both these tools, in the educational context might best be used as I mentioned before – in a cohort model or in a closed setting. Both of these provide the audience and the direction that these tools need to make them look good. If you have an ePortfolio as a requirement for graduation or part of a grad school application, then I’m sure students will be motivated. If you have a group of students who are going through a program together or are in a common specialization, then you might have enough of a “sphere” to allow for blogging as seen elsewhere on the ‘net. If students can bring their own ideas and not “bend” to the wants or requirements of a course instructor, cohort/class/program blogs could really fly. Both these suggestions require that instructors give up some level of control with regards to what they are getting back as assignments (I’ve mentioned before that one of the worst things that can happen to a student is a teacher not willing or able to accept an assignment because they are not willing to put the same amount of time into reviewing it as the student(s) put in creating it). This means that instructors have to “break out of their course” if they want to use these tools and see how the student is interpreting their requests on their own merit. So blogs might be only vaguely about the course topics and ePorts might have only one or two discussions, but loads of links that are related to the discussion, but if this is what the students are willing to give as an impression of what this course means to their life right now, that is likely all the instructor is going to get, if they want it “real”. Now the problem is standardizing these assignments to assess students fairly. That is something for another post…
Leave a Reply