The abstract of a paper published by a professor of Foreign Language and Literature at Whitman College:
This paper uses specific issues surrounding course blogging to provide a series of reflections regarding the articulation between pedagogy and technology in creating a next generation learning space and discourse community. It investigates the underlying structure and necessary constituent elements of a successful blog assignment and examines the notion of natural and unnatural virtual environments and the roles of the reader and the writer-reader. It suggests that blog assignments may not succeed equally well in all subject areas and gives a number of possible reasons. Furthermore, it posits a more nuanced criterion for the definition of goals and the evaluation of the success of a blog assignment as a learning community beyond the presence or absence of comments.
I can’t help but be cynical when someone writes a paper like this that is distributed online and yet shows utter incomprehension of the online medium. Perhaps it was the journal’s editor that is to blame, but here’s my list of gripes:
- electronic sources that are cited and linked to within the bibliography but not within the actual text
- utterly dense language that makes it nearly inaccessible to a significant number of students that may be interested is reading about using online tools in the classroom
- repeated use of the term “web 2.0″
Ultimately in order to create a “next generation learning space and discourse community” we’re going to need to open up that community to those of all apsects of life, including people for whom this text is just plain unreadable.
