Lessons learned from introducing blogging to teaching staff

Challenge Area

Key Problems

Strategies to address challenges

Developing technical confidence and competence

• Gaining access
• Navigating the dashboard
• Finding others’ blogs
• Uncertainty around visibility and privacy levels

• Set up accounts and blogs face-to-face in a computer lab
• Set regular tasks and deadlines as checkpoints
• Monitor individuals’ activity closely in early stages
• ‘Buddy-up’ less confident with more experienced and/or confident users
• Use group activities to ensure participants gain experience as both an author and a subscriber/commenter
• Ensure activities have a relevance and purpose beyond learning to use a blog – this helps participants to ‘over-ride’ frustration with the technology

Sharing and open practice

• Overestimation of the likelihood of negative judgement
• Reluctance due to self-consciousness or perfectionism
• Underappreciation of the value of one’s contributions to others

• Acknowledge challenges of sharing while emphasising the positive aspects (learning benefit to self - through feedback - and others)
• Show examples to emphasise positive and supportive interactions in similar contexts
• Build in opportunities for low-stakes practice
• Encourage use of ‘preview’ feature before posting
• Emphasise ease of editing post-publication
• Use peer grading exercises to demonstrate that others often value our contributions more highly than we do ourselves

Communication and collaborative working

• Preference for engaging passively rather than actively with others’ posts and ideas

• Use regular peer assessment of participation
• Show examples of interactions that have clearly impacted on understanding
• Build in synchronous online communication opportunities (e.g. webinars) to promote interaction between participants
• Allow & encourage participants to meet face-to-face and document conversations on their blogs as an alternative or ‘stepping stone’ to actually conversing online
• Acknowledge that online communication may feel strange or ‘false’ at first and that effective communication in this mode (like all things) takes practice

Writing in an online forum

• Difficulty communicating complex ideas succinctly and/or in simple terms
• Difficulty finding a written ‘voice’ that does not sound inappropriately academic, formal or structured
• Discomfort with writing generally, including dyslexia

• Acknowledge challenges of writing online while emphasising the positive aspects (value of trying to explain a concept in simple terms, time to analyse, reflect and check things through before posting)
• Allow & encourage participants to meet face-to-face and document conversations on their blogs as an alternative or ‘stepping stone’ to actually conversing online
• Emphasise options for alternative modes of communication; show examples of posts with images, sketches, video and audio