Frances Bell’s Blog

In an interesting session at 11.30 on Tuesday morning, Caroline Walker from University of Sunderland spoke of her use of blogs with education students in two modules to promote academic and digital literacies, and criticality. The use of blogs was driven by pedagogy and programme objectives, and took account of the students’ previous and everyday experiences of reading, writing and criticality. Students were required to keep a blog, dialogue privately with another person, and critically reflect on their own blogs. They used a public site but anonymised themselves by use of pseudonyms. Although there was some initial resistance, the group eventually decided to use the public site (rather than an alternative private space). Caroline, in answer to a question, compared student use of blogs with previous paper-based journals, and found them to be more immediate and less sanitised than the retrospectively written paper journals (also easier to share with other students). Another questioner using blogs with pre-service teachers stressed how important the immediacy aspect was to students who could derive support from each other when they wanted it.