October 2005 — Features
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The New Student-Teacher Channel
One of the most powerful observations was that students who were typically nonparticipatory revealed extensively in their response posts. The following student commentary gives a clue to the behavior: “I find it a lot easier to express myself through writing then [sic] verbally,and a lot of times in class it takes me along [sic] time to think of something sensible that I want to say and by that time the conversation has moved on. So, I have more time to sit and think when I am writing.”
In Online Counseling: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals (Elsevier, 2004), Internet theorists Ron Kraus, Jason Zack, and George Stricker point to a “zone of reflection” as a significant difference between face-to-face and online interaction. With a zone of reflection,students appear to process information at a much deeper cognitive level. Said one focus group participant: “I started to see [theories] more than just in the classroom. I would be watching a movie and I could analyze it.…Anywhere, I would just be like that is so and so theory.…I think it made us a little bit more critical about everything we learned in the class.”
Enhanced critical thinking has always been the hallmark of great learning experiences, and it appears that blogging can play a significant role in developing this skill.Even with these significant strengths, the blogging experience also revealed some important cautions for educators.
Caveats and Considerations
for Implementing Blogs
As mentioned previously, blogging generates
reciprocal self-disclosure between the
instructor and student, and more introverted
students who typically do not
reveal in the classroom may expose a great
deal online. Interestingly, these shy
students do not believe that online selfdisclosure
should be brought back into the
face-to-face classroom. One of the focus
group questions dealt specifically with the
issue of an instructor referring to a
student’s post in class. The students generally
indicated that once a disclosure is
made in the blog, it should stay in the blog:
“Some people are a little bit more private
about the things they write [online] and
there might be…an embarrassment
factor…so [it was all right] as long they
knew you were going to share it [in class]
and as long as it wasn’t…an attack environment.”
This is an important caution for educators using a blog,and there is some evidence in the literature to support the idea that people view online interactions very differently from face-to-face interactions (Robert Cathcart and Gary Gumpert, “Mediated Interpersonal Communication: Toward A New Typology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech,1983).
Another important
blogging concern is the
explicit control that must
be exercised by the
educator. Just as in
a face-to-face classroom,
students will reveal
inappropriate content or
comment in an inefficacious
manner. Instructors must be quick
and diligent in their management of
messages posted to a blog. As Susan
Hendrick writes in “Counseling and Self
Disclosure” (
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