Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology

If blogging is both the construction of a personal knowledge artefact and an ecological practice, which reveals emergent knowledges as a series of dynamically linked spaces, this immediately focuses any pedagogy of blogging on questions of connectivity and the evolution of ideas over time.

I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes over the duration of a degree course, rather than blogs focused on specific assignment tasks or blogs developed for single semester units are a more congruent use of this technology.

If students were encouraged to establish a blog at the beginning of their course and continued to use it to post research notes, stories and reflections throughout their degree studies, this would become a unique and powerful teaching and learning tool. The blog would evolve together with (and record) the student’s learning and practice experience. —Marcus O’Donnell —Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology (Blogtalk Downunder)

I agree. The panel I proposed for next year’s 4Cs was sparked by the realization that more and more students are coming into our classes with experience as social bloggers (or with a knowledge of other social networking programs, like friendster, P2P file sharing, and IM culture in general), and on the role of their academic blogging as it is situated in the larger context of the blogosphere. Only the very young or the very cutting-edge people in the composition field have the proper experience to assess this dynamic.

O’Donnell’s article also references Patricia Remmell’s KairosNews posting, “Falling out of love with blogging,” which sparked an excellent discussion of a topic rarely discussed in the blogosphere (for perhaps obvious reasons).

Via Kairosnews.