Gathering information

Thursday 12th June
Gathering information
Much time has really been spent on research; both of papers and of writing up the report. One of the difficulties has been in targeting information that is specific to the blogging for assessment issue; much reading has not been fruitful as when I ‘step’ back I realise the paper is more about collaboration and wikis, or motivation and retention, or comparing and contrasting the technological capabilities of VLEs versus Web 2.0 use (very interesting in itself, but again not relevant). The focus then becomes unclear and I appreciate I cannot include all of these threads, as there would be too many theoretical ideas to justify within such a short report.
New papers uncovered that may be of some value to me are –
Using blogging for higher order learning in large cohort university teaching: A case study; Brett Farmer, Audrey Yue and Claire Brooks Australasian Journal of Educational Technology2008, 24(2), 123-136 - An Outstanding Paper Award recipient, ascilite Singapore 2007 Conference http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/farmer.html (accessed 10/06/2008)
Modelling blended learning environments: Designing an academic development blog, G. E. Lefoe and W. Meyers
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=asdpapers

The issue of blogging as somewhere between a reflective journal and a portfolio of assessment evidence seemed to strike a chord with me as well; http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/october2006/index.html#_Toc148658501 and http://electronicportfolios.com/reflect/whitepaper.pdf (this also provided an excellent diagram of the balancing of portfolio assessment as a test versus as a story – very interesting.

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/news/erecord/2005-06/0327/best.html - discussed that credit had, in 2006, been given for a law student who blogged; "Blogs can transcend the ivory tower of legal academia by providing information to the general public. Not only prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges were using his blog as a resource, but relatives of criminal defendants and crime victims were using it as well. These are people who would never pick up a law journal." There are indeed a number of
“blawgs,”(http://3lepiphany.typepad.com/3l_epiphany/2006/02/academic_bloggi.html) on the law front, which link to the usefulness of blogs as developing practice and feeding this into academic credit. I see this is linking back to the issue of whether blogging is an unusual blend of personal and the social construction of knowledge.

I also received a response from the CMI regarding ethical guidelines for research –

‘I’m not aware of any guidelines specific to the Institute but many higher education institutions have their own guidelines. The following may also be helpful:
ESRC Research Ethics Frameworkhttp://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/opportunities/research_ethics_framework/
Research Guidelines from the British Educational Research Associationhttp://www.bera.ac.uk/publications/guides.php
You might also be interested in a forthcoming research report from the Institute: Generation Y: Unlocking the Talent of Young Managers which looks at managers’ uptake and use of blogs. The report is due for publication tomorrow and you should be able to download a summary from www.managers.org.uk/research. All the best with your project, …’ (09/06/2008)

I will certainly review the new report, as this has implications for the type of students who may be participating in the diploma course. I have also asked for a definitive answer on the validity blogs as assessment evidence and will hopefully receive that soon.
I feel I now have a sufficient range and depth of literature on the subject – I have reached the point where it would be difficult to review many more papers in any detail. Time to step back and ‘pull out’ the ‘big issues’, to justify my proposal…