I started my post-secondary studies in 1991, back in the days of paper registration and long line-ups at the Registrar's office. In class, a component of our grade was derived from contributions to class discussions, but I don't think this amounted to any more than 10% of the grade. What was the purpose of this? A cushion for the professor in assigning grades? To ensure attendance in class? An attempt to make students more accountable to assigned readings? Now here we are with 25% of a grade comprised from participation. I find myself in a participatory world, though I wonder if this was always the case and just labelled differently. True, blogs did not exist in 1991. Participation did, however. Teaching instruction may have differed, yet my construction of knowledge was always there whether the course delivery was behaviouristic or constructivist. Now the question becomes will I better meet learning outcomes in this way than I did back then? What am I learning as I type this? The words here will be posted online. I can go back and reflect on this entry. This I could have done in my hand-written class notes in 1991. What is different here is my peers can comment on my work as can anyone who cares to look at this blog. My class notes are made public and I am graded on the quality of my blog and my comments on my colleagues' blogs.
Leslie and Murphy (2008) studied the purpose of blogging in a post-secondary environment. They noted one purpose of blogging is to "support, facilitate, model, and increase opportunities for social, peer and group interaction, communication, presence, feedback, networking learning experiences, and getting to know each other" (p. 5). The idea of increasing social presence is an interesting one. On the surface this seems entirely ego-based, but I suppose we need to delve deeper into what social presence means.
Shen, Yu and Khalifa (2010) defined cognitive social presence as "the extent to which a user is able to construct and confirm meaning about his/her relationship with others and the social space" (p. 340). In this graduate course, I am among a community of learners contributing to developing a knowledge base or repository. I have access to my colleagues' "class notes" via blogs in the form of links to websites, text, audio or video. This helps me be an active participant in my learning. My professor presumably wants to assess my participation in this process. I have a responsibility and am accountable to my colleagues' learning, not only my own.
This breaks my mind.
Sources:
Leslie, P. & Murphy, E. (2008). Post-secondary students purposes for blogging. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 9(3), 1-17.
Shen, K.N., Yu, A. Y., & Khalifa, M. (2010). Knowledge contribution in virtual communities: accounting for multiple dimensions of social presence through social identity. Behaviour & Information Technology, 29(4), 337-348.
