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Chapter 11. Blogs: A Medium for Intellectual Engagement with Course Readings and Participants
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183 11 Blogs A Medium for Intellectual Engagement with Course Readings and Participants MARIANNA RYSHINA-PANKOVA AND JENS KUGELE Georgetown University Introduction IN THE AGE OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES and computer-mediated communication (CMC) that give access to a sea of information and offer various opportunities for responding and co-constructing it in chats, online forums, wikis, or blogs, a gruff traditional humanities professor questions skeptically whether blogs used in educational settings are just a new format for what one has been doing all along or a new form with yet-unexplored potential for fostering learning, reflection, and academically argumentative writing. Practitioners have reflected on the positive effects of using blogs in education (Ferdig and Trammell 2004; Lowe and Williams 2004; Oravec 2002; Walker 2005; Williams and Jacobs 2004). Researchers have tried to prove their effectiveness in learning in various disciplinary domains: teaching methods (Al-Fadda and AlYahya 2010; Hernández-Ramos 2004), information technology (Cuhadar and Kuzu 2010), political science (Lawrence and Dion 2010), business administration (Williams and Jacobs 2004), English (Richardson 2003), and composition and academic writing classes (Kelley 2008; Wang and Fang 2005). Most of the evidence, however, comes from quantitative results (number and frequency of blogs produced) and overwhelmingly from learner questionnaires and surveys in which students give feedback on what they perceive to be the advantages of blog writing in academic courses. Changing the focus on what instructors or students think about blogs to what they in fact do when they create this new discourse form, we propose to investigate the blog entries themselves. Given that course-related blogging has been associated with fostering engagement in content learning and an academic exchange about it, as one of its most beneficial aspects, we examine blog entries with the help of discourse analytical tools that help us demonstrate that 1. Learners do, indeed, engage in content learning as they interact with their peers through blogs; 2. this engagement is evident from the use of particular linguistic strategies employed ; and 3. this engagement enables us to make a strong statement about blogs as an instrument for promoting learning and academic argumentation. Data for our study comprise blog entries written for a course on the representation of witches in history, literature, and film. This course (taught in English) has been offered by the Department of German and serves as one of the courses that can be taken to fulfill the second of the two required humanities and writing classes at Georgetown University. In the particular context of this study, blogs are chronologically organized, and entries are published online with the goal of discussing class readings and responding to other students’ entries on these readings. Recognizing the critical role of language in knowledge construction, this study defines learning in connection to its realization though particular linguistic means. Specifically, it looks for evidence of learning in the linguistic strategies that students use in their blogs to express their perspectives on the course content and relate their views to the opinions and interpretations of other blog writers. To identify these strategies, a systemic-functional framework of appraisal and specifically ENGAGEMENT (written in all caps when referring to the term in its systemic-functional technical sense [Martin and White 2005]) is used. In line with this framework, the study analyzes markers of dialogic engagement as being significant to the genre of blog writing , reveals to what extent they are used by the learners, and discusses their function as instruments for academically accepted discursive knowledge construction and knowledge sharing. We begin the discussion with an overview of studies that support the claim about the conduciveness of blog writing for content learning. We then describe the institutional and instructional context of the study, its participants, and the function blogs served in the course. In the next section we explain the methodology behind the study. This is followed by reports on the quantitative results and qualitative discussion with regard to three aspects: engagement with content, engagement with course participants, and engagement as expression of one’s own opinion. We conclude with a summary of the results and their implications for viewing blogs as a useful tool for learning disciplinary content and improving academic writing skills. Content Learning through Blog Writing: Theoretical Assumptions and Research Evidence From a theoretical perspective, what makes one presume that interaction through blog writing can promote learning? The belief can be grounded in the framework of the sociocultural theory of learning that demonstrates the...