In March 2004, about two months before the birth of my son, I decided to record the experience of his impending arrival. My wife and I thought that it would be fun to blog from his point of view rather than ours. That was how Baby Isaac's Blog was born. Isaac is now five months old and still blogging.
The practice of blogging almost daily was a pleasant distraction and a way of writing creatively. I had no rules to follow and I could embed links to photos or video clips of Isaac anywhere in the blog. It was also an indirect way of informing friends and relatives back home of Isaac's development. So my own practice of blogging seeded my interest in blog research.
What convinced me that blogging was research worthy? First was the sheer number of blogs online compared to the dearth of literature on blogging. The second pull factor was what I read in the literature about how some innovative educators were using blogs in K-12 and higher education settings (see my previous entry). However, despite the number of fascinating ideas and practices, I was not convinced about their effectiveness in education due to the absence of rigorous evaluation. Third my work as a research assistant in a teacher education program, PIHnet, led me to believe that blogs might be more useful as a tool for monitoring and encouraging reflective practice.
Like most bulletin board systems, the existing forum tool in PIHnet was designed to support threaded discussions. This meant that only titles of postings were visible in one view (Figure 1) and only one posting was visible at a time in another view. To make matters worse, participants did not change or add titles as appropriate for their postings (Figure 1). This made it extremely difficult to follow trends of thought or lines of argument. I thought that blogs would have been more suitable for the intended purposes of the forum, i.e. monitoring, encourage reflection, and providing feedback. Finally, when the research team was considering the redesign of our tool set, we discussed the possibility of adding a journaling tool to better achieve the objectives of the forum.
Figure 1. Title view of discussion forum
It occurs to me now that I am rationalizing my preference for a blog tool partly on the technical affordances that a blog might provide and partly on the type of interaction we hope to see in PIHnet. I am reminded of a course that I took as a minor that the design and use of technology was a sociotechnical phenomenon. For one thing, this means that I should also think about the social aspects of blogging, not just the technical affordances. Despite what a tool is designed for, participants will find other uses for that tool or not use it at all. What they eventually use it for depends on a collective decision. For example, the some of the discussion areas might have been too rigid with guiding questions. The participants seemed to prefer the more open discussion areas. Yet another example: The participants seemed to find ways to get the other tools to do things that we did not expect them to do. They found workarounds to achieve their goals or requested new tools. The design and use of technology in PIHnet was indeed a sociotechnical phenomenon.
No comments:
Post a Comment