The Pros and Cons of Blogging

The advances in technology have led to many new tools being made available to educators. One of these advances is the Weblog. Known to some simply as a "blog," it is "part web site, part journal, and part free-form writing spaces that have the potential to enhance writing and literacy skills while offering a unique form of expression. So quotes authors Beverly B. Ray and Gail A. Coulter in their research piece, which was first published in Contemporary Issues in Technology and English Language Arts Teacher Education (CITE). The authors have an interesting concept. They see teachers as naturally reflective people and question whether the reflective medium of blogging can be of benefit to the teachers themselves, and in the classroom.

While judging their findings to be somewhat insufficient, I do see the need to analyze a subject such as this. At face value, it would make sense for a teacher to utilize such a communication medium. The blog author can gather feedback while maintaining control of the discussion. There is no room for sidebars and jagged arguments. The author controls the content and can use the control to gather needed feedback.



There is no current controversy surrounding this subject, but I do hope that more data becomes available to judge the success, or failure of Weblog use for the modern day teacher.


Authors Ray and Coulter enter the discussion with a unique and worthwhile purpose. They view teachers as naturally reflective people, always looking for feedback to enhance their performance in the classroom. Recognizing the changes brought about in the electronic age, they focus on one advance, which was relatively unheard of eight years ago the Weblog. Technologies, including weblogs, provide a unique and authentic opportunity to glimpse the written reflective processes employed by practicing teachers. If this is true, then how could such a tool help the practicing teacher?



The authors put on their researching caps and attempted to answer this question with data driven evidence. They chose the language arts teachers, because they would seem to be the most likely to embrace a technology that required frequent writing. Their purpose was to understand the role and function of blogs as used by language arts teachers. They were not necessarily trying to prove or disprove the effectiveness of the blog. However, they were trying to get a better indication as to the depth and scope of the blog reflections. The authors/researchers used the following two questions to guide their study:
1. Do individual blog entries related to educational practice demonstrate written reflection?
2. If so, what depth of reflection is demonstrated by the entries?

Finding The Participants and Quantifying Results

                                 
It would seem easy to locate a large number of language arts teachers blogs from the Internet. We don't know how many bloggers exist, but the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006) indicated that the number exceeded 12 million. From this rich pool, the authors decided to identify and collect data only from blogs created by K-12 in-service teachers in the United States. Of the 142 reported during the past year (2005), 33 were known to be language arts teachers blogs. One might assume that the number would increase in a year's time; however, in the fall of 2006, the number located was a mere 11. As a reviewer, my first questions were "How did the number decrease by roughly 67% in a year?" and "Did teachers lose interest in the medium?"


Undaunted, the researchers used the links of the 11 bloggers, as well as Google and Yahoo searches, to locate ten more blogs, raising their total to 21. Hoping to find power in numbers, five entries from each blog were chosen for scoring purposes, making for a total of 105 entries for reflective review. Each entry was reviewed by two experts from the teacher education and instructional technology fields, for a grand total of 210 blog reviews.


The scoring system was broken down into five categories, with each of the five reviews being rated on a 0.0 to 0.2 scale with .005 increments. The highest possible reflective score any set of data could receive was a 1.
Here are the descriptions of each level of blog reflection, followed by the number and percentage of subject scores:
0.0 - There is no evidence of reflective practice within the entry (14 13%)
0.05- The educational blogger reflects on his or her work and improvement, but does not provide examples in the entry (21 23%).
0.1 - The educational blogger demonstrates an ability to reflect on his or her work, but examples provided are of a minimal quality (32 35%)
0.15 The educational blogger demonstrates an ability to reflect on his or her work. A concrete example(s) is provided (14 15%)
0.2 The educational blogger demonstrates exemplary evidence of a range of metareflective practices and provides an example(s) within the entry (24 26%).

 
The examples for each show the difference in entry quality, subject depth, and length of thought. Because of my opinion regarding the findings, the results are not relevant. However, the group mean score is 0.106, which indicates a minimal quality of blog author reflection, on average.I agreewith Ray and Coulter's rationale for attempting to disseminate data on this subject. I do believe that this topic will become more useful in the near future. If language arts teachers know that opening a blog can be a proven method of improving teaching performance, there would be a reason for curriculum leaders to recommend the practice to their teachers. It can be a valuable study. I believe it will become a valuable study in the future.


However, it is hard to justify any findings based on the mere 21 subjects. By comparison, I try to imagine anybody determining the next President of the United States based on a poll of 21 registered voters. I won't see the data as valuable until at least 100 subjects have been rated by at least three experts.


I believe that weblogs can be valuable for the personal growth of a language arts teacher. It may be effective for helping in the classroom. My conclusion is that some day a study will prove this. Ray and Coulter's study is not the one to prove it.

Conclusion

 
Given the amount of material that the authors were able to find on this subject, there is no doubt that the use of Weblogs for teachers is a worthwhile topic of research and discussion. While I find the topic to be valid, I believe that the authors may have diluted their argument by focusing solely on language arts teachers. It is very difficult to prove any meaningful points with only 21 subjects to observe. The authors even admit this themselves in the limitations section. A longer study with more subjects may have shown more pertinent results. I think another, more comprehensive study will eventually prove that a weblog can be an effective tool for language arts teachers, and should be used as a tool for improving ones performance in the classroom.