Selasa, 7 Oktober 2008

Blogging as Pedagogic Practice

Blogging as Pedagogic Practice:
Artefact and Ecology1
Marcus O’Donnell
University of Wollongong, Australia

Much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in
higher education focuses on evaluation of blogging as a communicative technique.
This type of discussion largely assumes that successful integration of blogging
into course delivery should be judged against a pre-existing and unchallenged
pedagogical model. This paper argues that to leverage its full educational potential
blogging must be understood not just as an isolated phenomena, but as part of a
broad palette of cybercultural practices which provide us with new ways of doing
and thinking. The paper looks at the ways broader theoretical models associated with
the development of the blogosphere might challenge or enhance current theories of
teaching and learning.
Blogging Theory Blogging Practice
Susan Herring and colleagues in a content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs
concluded that there was a gap between blogging rhetoric and blogging practice.
Our analyses revealed less evidence than expected of blogs as interlinked,
interactive, and oriented towards external events; rather, most of the blogs in
our corpus are individualistic, even intimate, forms of self-expression, and
a surprising number of them contain few or no links. Based on the profile
generated by the empirical analysis, we traced the historical antecedents of
weblogs back to hand-written diaries. We also pointed out the hybrid nature of
weblogs, suggesting that the technical affordances of the weblog format make
it readily adaptable to multiple purposes of use. Finally, we suggested that
these same affordances bridge, and ultimately blur the boundaries, between
HTML documents and text-based CMC, as blogs and other interactive Web based communication systems replace some of the functions of traditional
Internet genres and give rise to new functions. (Herring et al 2004)