I. My angle

• an incredible value in being skeptical about claims that are being made in terms of social software in the classroom and whether or not its working (paraphrasing Mimi, research BoF)
• relevant for the idea of creating a resource center along the lines of what Mimi and Nicole have talked about, and things like best practices... all of the experiences that we've heard so far are wonderful and intriguing, but contextual - can we somehow look across cases to draw out best practices that may be more generalizable?

II. What's out there?

blogosphere - a growing body of work in a variety of areas such as:

• political blogging
• identity work
• blogging vis a vis mass media
• genre analyses of weblogs
• community and blogs
• why do people blog - motivation (Yuri and Joe)
• who's blogging - gender and blogs

...working with a variety of subjects from youth to adults and from a variety of perspectives (interdisciplinary)

Sources:
BlogTalk
Torill Mortensen's bibliography
Into the Blogosphere

classroom blogging:

• theoretical discussions around the pedagogical implications of blogging
• on the ground descriptions of classroom blogging
• motivation

...

III. Working together: teacher beliefs and collaborative learning on undergraduate literature class blogs
RQ: Is collaborative learning taking place on class blogs, and what relationship does it have to teacher beliefs and orchestration of the classroom environment?
Sample: 10 undergraduate literature class blogs
Methods:

• 4 expert raters participated in a prototype-sorting task in which they were asked to determine whether or not each blog displayed a low, middle, or high amount of collaborative learning
• 7 of 10 professors took Approaches to Teaching Inventory (K Trigwell, M Prosser) - 5 pt Likert scale, low to high constructivist

Other data: class syllabi, answers to questions about their goals for including blogs in class

Results: ...in process.

• ATI average score range: 2.9 - 4.2
• Rating chart

http://sarahlohnes.com/ratings_ati_chart.gif

IV: What questions should we be asking? (and how should we be going about answering them?)

digitally native research methodologies:
Chuck - starting from research assumptions and questioning their usefulness in digital environments (ie what's participant observation in an online space)?

• mimi: what is significant and what needs to be measured? exploratory research
• other research paradigms exist and maybe we should be thinking in terms of those - CMC for example

questions:

• is a blog in a class a blog?
• tension btwn outside of class and assigned in-class blogging
• "if you want to see my real blog" - David - describing a relationship
• student social worlds - what happens if you introduce a blogging space into a 1st grade class vs. a college class (Jude)
• what's the unit of analysis? (Chuck) group dynamic vs. individual consciousness - each changes the other; the blog acting on us
• in the b school context
• relationship btwn their blogging and a suite of social software
• diff btwn something that's group authored and collaborative learning

presentation by Sarah Lohnes, May 15, SSAW