Evidence of Learning in Blogs

Evidence of Learning in Blogs Presented by: Kacy Whittenburg & Kathleen Borsos-Wooley

Overview

Blogs are changing the face of education (social, educational, political and professional discourse).

Blogs so entrenched in our culture that new terms are being coined (Blogosphere and Blogerati).

Research Purpose

From Literature Review: surmised that Blogs may be a rich resource for promoting learning.

Purpose of study to determine if Blogs are an appropriate learning tool.

Focused on Higher Education and Professional Development for Educators and Instructional Designers.

Impact of Literature Review

Happy Findings:

More than 200 million Blogs currently on the web.

Rich social environment promotes cooperative learning by its collaborative nature.

Conversational nature leads to interactivity, higher order thinking skills and improved flexibility in learning.

Anyone with computer and internet access can now have a slice of cyberspace.

Blogs are so accessible, researchers believe they offer profound opportunity for learning.

Impact of Literature Review, con’t.

Needs:

Need in education for assistance in learning process.

Encouraging information but little data exists on evidence of learning.

Contextual Factors

Limitations:

Massive content area and types of learners led to decision to limit study to three types of Blogs.

No data collected on younger learners.

Time frame limited to a recent one month period for each Blog.

Methodology

After conducting Literature Review, team identified three categories:

Higher Education

Professional Development for ID’ers

Professional Development for Educators

Selected 4 Blogs from each category.

Determined time frame.

Determined number of posts.

Developed and defined coding scheme.

Coding Scheme Negative Criticism Debate Constructive Criticism Interpretation Offers Additional Resources Reflection Elaboration Synthesis Don’t Understand Evaluation Understand Analysis Disagree Example/Non-example Agree Information

Instrumentation

Appropriate method of investigation determined to be content analysis.

Instruments are the researchers themselves.

Technical tools used: Excel: collate and organize data Analyse-It: inferential statistical analysis

Data Analysis

Data collected was subjective in nature.

Raters analyzed Blog posts using a coding scheme (presented previously).

Note: Any single post may have multiple codes assigned.

Data Analysis, con’t.

Sample of a post with coding:

Information Interpretation Evaluation Analysis Interpretation BLOG: Educational Technology Weblog http://www.psesd.org/weblogs/edtech/ LATEST TRENDS IN ONLINE LEARNING Yet another article about online learning, this time in the Christian Science Monitor. There isn't too much radically new, but it does reflect this continues to be an increasing trend. The Florida Virtual High School is growing at the phenomenal pace of 40-60% per year, and now Michigan is poised to be the first state to require that every student take at least one online course before graduating from high school. There's still some muddy thinking floating around out there, though. One expert is quoted as thinking that virtual classes "...could help ease the nationwide shortage of math and science teachers." All of the online classes referred to in the story use real teachers, so I don't see how that affects the overall shortage problem. Unless, of course, the online teacher supports more students than a face-to-face teacher - which they don't in any (good) program I've seen. I'll be really happy when we have stamped out the notion that online learning somehow costs less than classroom learning. Posted by Conn McQuinn at 11:31 AM 3/31/06

Descriptive Analysis

Data organized into 8 tables in Excel to reflect various descriptive analysis of content.

Each table contains data from 4 Blogs.

Nine posts randomly sampled and coded.

16 possible code categories .

Table 9: Mean values organized by content code, and Blog category

Table 10: One-Way ANOVA Results, Organized by Content Code

Inferential Analysis

Data non-parametric (does not lie on a normal curve).

One-way ANOVA conducted to determine magnitude of difference between learning related content areas.

At a confidence level of 95%, no significant differences revealed.

Findings

Summative results indicate wide range of learning related content.

Learning related content similar across the 3 categories.

All three categories contain primarily “information” code.

Professional Development for Educators Blogs have most elaboration, offers additional resources and constructive criticism.

Findings, con’t.

Higher Education contained most “information”, “analysis”, and “reflection” codes.

Least occurrences in “disagree” and “don’t understand” categories.

Confidence level of 95%, ANOVA revealed no significant differences in code classification.

Discussion and Conclusions

No significant variation in learning related content across the 3 categories.

Greatest differences were in the comments.

Overall, all Blogs showed rich amount of content (many occurrences in each code classification).

Discussion and Conclusions, con’t.

Overall, Blogs across all 3 categories show evidence of learning related content.

Much evidence to suggest that learning and Blogs are linked.

Discussion and Conclusions, con’t.

What Next?

More research needed:

to determine the degree of learning Blogs can afford

to determine best practices

in other content areas

in other learning groups (younger learners)

Mission: To make Blogging a learning experience for everyone!

Final Thoughts

Common Sentiment:

“ a Blog extends the learning experience well beyond the face-to-face classroom, creating a more complete learning experience”

-V.B.Harper, Jr.

The New Student Teacher Channel

References

Clyde, L. A. (2005). Educational blogging. Teacher Librarian, 32(3), 43-45.

Drezner, D. and Farrell, H. (2004). The Power and Politics of Blogs . Retrieved February 27, 2006 from http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/Blogpaperfinal.pdf

Du, H. S., & Wagner, C. (January, 2005). Learning with Weblogs: An Empirical Investigation. In HICSS '05: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos:IEEE Computer Society.

Ferdig, R.E., & Roehler, L.R. (2003). Student engagement in electronic discussions: Examining online discourse in literacy pre-service classrooms. Journal of Research on Technology in Education , 36(2), 119-136.

Ferdig, R.E., & Trammell, K.D. (2004). Content delivery in the Blogosphere . THE Journal , 31 (7), 12, 16-17, 20.

Graesser, A. C., Person, N. K. & Hu, X. (2002). Improving Comprehension Through Discourse Processing. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 89 , 33-44.

References, con’t.