Blogging in Higher Education--Blogging can help "learn how to learn"

Blogging in Higher Education--Blogging can help "learn how to learn"

Upon the technology development, computer and the Internet are being widely applied in different fields. And education is surely one of the important fields. Especially for the higher education, it emphasizes self-learning. Thus, blogging becomes a very useful tool for the tertiary educators and students. Learning is exchanging ideas with the others. And blogging could surely enhance the idea-exchange. Through blogging, students can write their reflections about their learning and review their peers’ thinking when reading their blogs. Also the group can communicate through commenting on each other blogs. This is applicable to the educators too. The group can then exchange their ideas towards the specific topics or subjects. Blogs certainly help link up students and the world. And actually, it is actually describing what I am doing now. However, with blogging, what else can be done?

Nowadays, blogging is a common practice for worldwide tertiary education. Yet, besides simply express ideas towards specific topics, it provides chances for students to learn through different contexts. In 2001, Judy Robertson published a paper named “The educational affordances of blogs for self-directed learning”. It is mainly about investigating the functional properties of blogging software and studying how it can enable groups of users to read, write and comment on others’ writing. According to Robertson (2011, p. 1629), reflection is important for self-directed learning, but self-directed learning encompasses other high level skills which can also be developed through blogging. For example, students may design diaries in engineering education instead of just writing journals for responding to critical incidents in the domain of teacher education. Learning through design is a rich and complex task. As described by Puntambekar & Kolodner (cited in Robertson 2001, p.1629), it “provides opportunities for students to incrementally construct, evaluate, discuss and revise both the models they are designing and their conceptions, thus encouraging students to engage in meta-cognitive activities such as planning and monitoring”. Thus, blogging does not mean something only about texts, but far beyond this.

(Photo sourced: http://cdn.dejanseo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/blog-ideas-resized-600.png)

Blogging seems to be a very good learning tool. Being an Education Major student, I would say that learning how to learn would be the most important. According to Higgins (cited in Robertson 2001, p.1628),“learning how to learn” is a broad and sometimes nebulous concept which encompasses independence, meta-cognition, thinking skills, self-regulation, self esteem and self-efficacy. Does blogging also help? I would say “yes”. Writing a blog is originally a chance for training one’s learning independence. One of my concerns is that students have to write a blog proactively. Through the whole process of blogging, students can train their structuring, developing and analysing skills. The bloggers are going to “write out” their thinking and ideas, which is a king of meta-cognition training.

(Photo sourced: http://edudemic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/blog-3.jpg)

All in all, when making good use of blogging, blogs could be a tool for expressing emotion; it can be a good tool for learning. Students of different professionals can also make use of blogs to communicate with their peers and the world. And they can surely learn through the process.

Reference

Robertson, J. 2011 ‘The educational affordances of blog for self-directed learning’, Computers and Education, vol. 57, pp. 1628 – 1644.