Blogs: Enhancing Links in a Professional Learning Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs: Enhancing Links in a Professional Learning Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers
This article reports on a smallish study of the use of blogs in learning. The authors look at blogs strictly from the perspective of community-building, ascribing an overtly constructionist purpose to their use, "which emphasizes a social or situated process of learning and personal construction of knowledge, including 'modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration'." They then studied the posts written by a small population. Surprisingly (and not plausibly) they found that "the majority of the blogs (over 75%) posted by the participants demonstrated an in-depth level of information processing." This may be true of teachers but not the wider population. they also suggest that inductee teachers do not comment as much on their peers' blogs, and thus need more formal introductions to blogging. But I don't think this is a problem specific to the technology - I remember in 1986 in John Baker's philosophy of Mind class doing something (on the university mainframe) something very much like blogging (I still have every page, every post, all bound together). More...