- Yao-Jen Chang, Yao-Sheng Chang, Shu-Yu Hsu, Chiu-Hui Chen, Social Network Analysis to Blog-based Online Community, presented in International Conference on Convergence Information Technology 2007, Gyeongju, Korea. November 21~23, 2007. (EI)
Although the use of blogs has grown extensively in the past 5 years, our understanding of how to use blogs in an effective and meaningful way is still limited. In particular, acquiring more cohesive and useful information on the use of blogs is partially dependent on developing a consistent, comprehensive, theory-driven metric to assess quality and effectiveness. Considerable research has been carried out on the educational use of blogs. However, the use of blogs in education or knowledge management is more or less experimental and its effectiveness is far from clear. Research methods such as user survey and ethnography have been used in assessment but the perspective differences in surveys and methodological differences make it difficult to combine the results into a cohesive base of knowledge that can guide practice and education. Therefore, it is argued that a more comprehensive, theory-driven assessment tool is needed to advance our understanding of how to best use blogs in education. The purpose of this study, then, was to research, develop and test a multicomponent, theoretically driven metric to assess the effectiveness of blogs.
Method
Sample
The sample tested consisted of 36 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory computer science course at a university in a metropolitan area. The students, mostly males with 5 females, ranging from sophomores to seniors. The data were collected and analyzed a month after the students finished the course.
Procedure
The blogs were part of a regular face-to-face course that met once a week for 180 minutes. Participation in social learning was worth 1/30 of the final grade, to minimize the negative impact of being graded yet provide incentives to become involved in the social learning through blogs. The blogs were intended to be student-led, and the teacher would only intervene if there were problems that students could not resolve, such as severe controversies and name calling.
2 comments:
This was a great idea to conduct class online, and I believe this study was proven.
But I need to discuss 2 things that I have experienced :
1. When I did my 1st homework, it involves table. The blog application shows wrong result than I need. I've tried to learn how to made the table nice to look, but still, the application was not provide the tools and behavior as I need. I've compared to complete the homework by using Ms. Word. It just takes 1 hour. But when I tried to do that in blog application, it takes about 4 hours with unsatisfied result. So I thing the blog provider should improve their application's feature , and don't let it be ineffective activity.
2. When class conducted online, the Instructor can evaluate about the response of the participants, including the time. Based on that things, Instructor can judge for the score. But we have to think about connection failure as a critical part. Let's imagine, when a participant want to submit their homeworks, and they get trouble with their internet connection, or the bandwidth is too narrow (just like in my country), he/she will failed to complete the job. It makes this "online teaching" can't get its goal : effective and efficient teaching. So I think the Instructor should prepare another back-up scoring model to avoid these unpredicted failures.
Regards,
Budhi Kristianto
9576074
Thanks for your great feedback. The blogging tool is not perfect, and sometimes we can just live with it. You mentioned preparation of table in blogs is challenging. I agree. On the other hand, bloggers do not use tables often. If you insist, you many want to convert the table into an image format and just upload it. Second, you mention it is more time consuming to compose in blogs than use Word. I am not surprise. If you are less experienced with new stuff such as blogs, it could be the case. After more and more practice, you may see it differently. The third thing you mention regards the connectivity issue which is closely related to digital divides. I cannot agree more. For some regions in the world, Internet access is not always convenient or even possible. Therefore, online courses have their "dark sides" and not always possible. Personally, I don't use "time" as a discriminant when grading, partially due to the connectivity issues. More importantly, time to think is valuable and worthwhile. We do encourage student to think not to rush. Our online blog is intended to serve as a compliment or face-to-face learning and I hope it can help build a platform that each of us can keep connected and active in learning in-presence or outside of the campus.
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