Acceptance, Usage, And Communication Patters Of A Blogging Exercise For Students

Acceptance, Usage, and Communication Patters of a Blogging Exercise for Students Ulrich Schrader Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt am Main, Germany [email protected] Abstract: In Germany openly accessible blogs for student education on the undergraduate level are still not very common. After explaining the ideas behind using a blog students were given the assignment to post at least two own entries and to comment at least five times on an openly accessible blog during the semester. The blog was centred on a common topic and all students were invited to the blog. At first students where a little apprehensive about their entries being visible by fellow students and also on a worldwide scale, but at the same time they liked the idea about writing for a larger audience than just their professor. While most of them choose to use a different author name to post, some of them still used their real name or an identifying abbreviation. In general the style of writing seemed to have improved. Although the blog was available for about 5 months more than half of the students did use a timeframe of on month or less to fulfil their assignment and did not use the blog as a means for ongoing communication. Problems in using the blog were partly caused by students first writing their post using a word processor and using elaborate formatting which did not survive the cut and paste operations. Since students were commenting the work their fellow students the resulting communications patterns where analyzed. Some group building did appear in the pattern. The hypothesis that the group building was caused by a common topic could not be held. Rather some clustering was seen by students posting at about the same time. This can be interpreted as a means to reduce workload. In looking for a fitting entry to comment on they started at the most recent one and worked their way back. The goal to engage the students for a prolonged time could not be met for most of the students. Still they considered the exercise a very interesting and engaging one. They particularly liked the idea of using up-to-date technology. Keywords: weblog, blog, usage, acceptance, web 2.0. 1. Introduction Weblogs, later abbreviated as blogs started out as simple diaries organizing entries (posts) in a reverse chronological order. They allowed others to comment on each entry. Due to their ease of use they attracted a large community of bloggers, who made up the so called blogoshere. With the availability of providers that allow user to create blogs for free; blogs became a tool ready to be used by everyone. Going along with the definition of a blog given by Paquet , five features are representative of blogs: personal editorship, a hyperlinked posting structure linking to other entries or content on the internet, frequent updates, free public access to the content via the internet, and archived postings .(Paquet 2003). One important feature that is missing in the list is the RSS-feed automatically generated by most blogging applications. RSS stands for "really simple syndication", or "rich site summary", or "RDF site summary". It is defined according to the XML standard and allows for the easy subscription to blogs by interested users using an application known as a news reader or blogreader. The blogreader has the task to alert the user to new or changed content. A RSS-feed basically consists at least of three tags: author, link, and description (Bartlett-Bragg 2003). While blogs have been existent since the late nineties in one way or another, it has been only in about the last 3-4 years that they have been applied to educational purposes (Williams 2004). Downes argues that blogs are the most significant technological development in online teaching and learning since the introduction of enterprise level learning management systems (LMS) (Downes 2004). Farmer and Bartlett-Bragg they cite in their review examples of educational blogs that were not successful in some aspects (Farmer and Bartlett-Bragg 2005). Partly some problems were cause by functional deficiencies of the blogging application used. In this paper the use of a blogging exercise is described. Since the blogging application records the dates of all entries, it was tried to analyze the data for patterns of usage. There is very little in the literature about how and when are students reacting to a blogging exercise.

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2. Method In the winter semester of 2006/2007 a class of 29 nurse management students were given the assignment to engage actively in a group blog. Their prior experiences in using web applications ranged from very little to experienced. It was a similar design to that used by Cooper and Boddington. (Cooper and Boddington 2005).The freely available blogging application Blogger was also chosen as platform. The major difference to Cooper and Boddington was the group size. They had only 5 students per group, while in this assignment all 29 student became members of the blog. It was set to be openly available to read for everyone interested. Also there were no restrictions for outsiders to comment. A captcha mechanism was enabled to prevent automatic spambots from commenting. The students in this track do differ from the regular students at the university since the nursing management track has as a prerequisite several years of working experience at a management level. During their studies they are still part time employed. This results in most students being in their thirties or forties. They had never actively used or posted to a blog. So they did no have any prior experience. All 29 student were invited to join the blog. For the assignment the students had to post each two th entries on the group blog and to write five comments. The assignment was open from November 17 , th 2006 to April 18 , 2007- a total of 153 days. The blog was centered on a common topic. In order to write a post the students had to research literature or the internet for sources that mention advantages of nursing information systems over traditional paper based solutions and write a short critical appraisal of the source and its contents. After the deadline of the blog the dates of each entry and all comments were determined and analyzed in order to find patterns in the usage of the blog. 3. Results 3.1 Reactions to the assignment After a first explanation of the assignment some students where a little apprehensive about their entries being visible by fellow students and also on a worldwide scale, but at the same time they liked the idea about writing for a larger audience than just their professor. Since they were allowed to use aliases as their blog identity it did not pose a problem to them. In the end all aliases were uncovered among the students themselves. Being visible did trigger a discussion about professionalism and using real names on the internet. Four students ended up using identifying names as being at least the family name and the initials of the first name. The other students did use their first name or a nickname known to the group (16), or a fantasy name (9). Some students were quite surprised when the first external visitor did leave a comment on the blog within about one week after the first post did appear. During the whole time period there were five external visitors. This number is quite low but understandable as the blog was not actively promoted at that time. 3.2. Start of the student's activity Considering the long timeframe for completing the assignment it was interesting to analyze the date they posted or commented for the first time on the blog. This is described in figure 1.

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Figure 1: Cumulative frequency of students having been active It can clearly be seen that a small group of students (4) got involved in the first week of the assignment. Interestingly three students did start two days before the Christmas holiday. This does correspond to the quite demanding part time work since most students work as nurse managers in healthcare institutions. But the most amazing fact is that almost half of the students did procrastinate until after the end of the semester break. Taking a closer look reveals that the steep increase in the curve does correspond to a day at the computer lab where a 10 minutes problem solving session related to issues around using the blog was given. It did turn out that there were three major handicaps with the use of the blog:  The process of getting an account with Blogger and later Google was not understood. Some invitation mails got lost. Some did not answer to the mail confirming the email address.  Student were sometimes not aware that the learning management system of the university and Blogger were different entities and required different usernames and passwords.  Quite a few students were writing their posts offline using a word processor. Unfortunately the copy and paste procedure does also copy some formatting information resulting sometimes in an undesired appearance of the post. One drawback of the late sign-on of the students was that the process had to be explained quite often. 3.2. Duration of the activity Another different question was how long students were taking to complete the assignment. Since it was explained that being active in a blog is an ongoing endeavor, that a blog is not just a means for publishing, but also for communication, it was considered better practice to be active (posting and commenting) for a prolonged period of time. Unfortunately for this case study it was not possible to determine to what extent students did return to the blog after having completed their assignment, if they did not post or comment. Figure 2 displays the frequency of the time students were taking to complete their assignment.

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Figure 2: Time used by students to complete the assignment In interpreting this figure it must be taken into account that the columns are not equidistant. The first column covers only a range of one day, the second four days, the third 5 days. All other columns cover a range of ten days. Of the 29 students 5 finished the complete blogging assignment on one day. More than a third of the students spent only 10 days or less on completion. While this did meet the quantitative requirements, the students did not get the idea of the blog as an ongoing activity as a mean for communication and collaboration. If they did not come back to the blog at a later time, they did not experience being commented upon and they did not experience the interactive nature of a blog with a comment sometimes triggering reflective activities. The strategy applied by these students is very typical of the one applied to traditional homework assignments: "Start and get it done!" They were using the blog as a means to publish. At least two thirds of the students did spread out the assignment over a period of more than a month. This could imply that for asynchronous interactive assignments traditional strategies to get your homework done have to be unlearned. The strategy should be: "Do small pieces at a time and wait for others to respond. Build on their responses!" A hypothesis could be that the students with a get-it-done strategy were the first to start the assignment to get it over and out of the way.

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Figure 3: Duration of the activity versus the entry date of the student Figure 3 is a plot of the time it took a student to complete the assignment in relation to the date of the first post or comment. It can be clearly seen that exactly the opposite relation is true (correlation coefficient of r = -0.79). Generally the earlier a student started the assignment the longer he prevailed as an active participant in the blog. While it is obvious, that the closer a student gets to the deadline of the assignment, the less time they have to be an active participant of the blog. Still the diagram shows that all the students who started before midterm of the assignment participated at least as long as all the students that started after midterm. One might speculate that the students how started early had a stronger interest in trying out the new technology and trying to expose themselves to it. A similar effect can be seen in figure 4 where the interval of activity by each student is plotted.

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Figure 4: Period of concurrent activity for each student sorted by date of first activity This figure 4 again shows that the early starters where active for a longer period than the procrastinators. But it also shows that about 8 students were active at one time. This result will became important again when looking at possible clusters. 3.3 Analysis of clustering of students It was speculated in the beginning of the assignment that students might cluster around common topics. This could not be shown. Also it could not be shown that a "if you comment on my entry, I will comment on your entry" strategy was in effect. The only clear mechanism that did turn up, was a "I comment the first entry that I see" strategy. This strategy minimizes the students workload. When they enter website of the blog the most recent entry is always displayed. For the 10 next most recent entries only the title is visible as a direct link to the post. All other entries are hidden in the archive organized by months. Thus finding good articles to comment on, that are not so recent requires more reading and thus more work. This effect can be seen clearly in figure 5. Here the distribution of the time difference in days between the posts and their comments is shown.

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Figure 5: Distribution of the time difference between the posts and their comments A large number of comments (65 of a total of 144) were made to posts less than 10 days old at the time of the comment. If this workload saving strategy is applied, it does become clear why other potential clustering mechanisms are not visible. So figure 4 can be used as a tool to determine who might comment on whom just by looking at the students who are active at the same time or were just active. 3.4 Other results Some students did express the concern that since that they are writing for a much larger audience than just their professor, the content of their post must be very important and they had a hard time finding anything worthy, according to their self set standards. This did correlate with the authors personal impression, not systematically studied in any way, that the quality of the writing did improve in the way that the content was presented easier to understand, e.g. not so many long, complex sentences; that the content was thought out better. When the lecture was systematically evaluated in February 2007, students mentioned in the open questions that they liked the idea to be introduced to new technologies of learning, they found it challenging and motivating. The assignment was interesting and they did like also that their efforts could be useful to others. Interestingly they demanded internet access for the lecturer during the lecture time in order to integrate interesting content on the internet and solutions to problems into the course. Being commented by external visitors to the blog was mentioned as a motivating factor. When the original Blogger account was transferred to a Google account due to the acquisition of Blogger by Google, some students started to have problems logging into Blogger. This did create some support work. If similar blogs are maintained by the university a helpdesk for students should be considered. In this case study the support was done by the lecturer. Since the assignment was mostly done from home, the student's PC must be setup to correctly connect to access the internet at all times. This was not always the case. Again, if it is required of non-technical students to use the internet for completing their assignment, a student helpdesk is required. 4. Discussion

The results of this little study are limited in several ways: 1. it was only done with a small group of students; 2. compared to other students the group was not representative to other students in being significantly older and thus having been exposed to information technologies in a different way in the past; 3. as students working part time in demanding jobs and mostly additionally having a family at same time, they had to come up with effort saving strategies, this study has shown that these strategies have to be unlearned in order to participate successfully in prolonged interactive assignments. Whether the results are comparable to other, normal students still remains to be shown. 5. Conclusion and lessons learned Using a blog as an educational tool seems to be accepted by students and is considered to be interesting even by students with a non-technical background. If the blog assignment is open over a long period of time two point should be taken into account:  Make sure that all students sign on and start posting early in the process.  Encourage a homework strategy of: "Do small pieces at a time and wait for others to respond. Build on their responses!"  Advertise the blog in order to get more external visitors. This seems to be a motivating factor.  The idea to have one large blog with only one topic should probably be replaced by several blogs with topics closer related to the students problems or work in order to get them motivated from early on to become active in the blog. It did not seem to be a problem that the blog was open available. It was seen as motivating. The goal to engage the students for a prolonged time could not be met for most of the students. Still they considered the exercise a very interesting and engaging one. They particularly liked the idea of using up-to-date technology. But most of the students did use the blog as a means of publishing not as a means for communication. References Bartlett-Bragg, A. (2003) ”Blogging to Learn“, Knowledge Tree eJournal , [online], http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au/edition04/pdf/Blogging_to_Learn.pdf. Cooper, C. and Boddington, L. (2005). "Assessment by blog: Ethical case studies assessment for an undergraduate business management class" Blogtalk downunder conference 2005. [online], http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=62 . Downes, S. (2004, September/October). Educational blogging: Blogtalk. EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 39, No. 5, PP 14-26, [online]. http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp. Farmer , J. and Bartlett-Bragg , A. " Blogs @ anywhere: High fidelity online communication", ascilite 2005: Balance, Fidelity, Mobility: maintaining the momentum? pp. 197-203. [online], http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/22_Farmer.pdf Godwin-Jones, R. "Emerging Technologies: Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration" Language Learning & Technology, May 2003, Vol. 7, No.. 2, pp. 12-16 , [online], http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/emerging/ Paquet, S. (2003) "Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research", Knowledge Board, , [online], http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/stories/2002/10/03/personalKnowledgePublishingAndItsUsesInRes earch.html Williams, J. B. and Jacobs, J. (2004) ”Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector”; Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp 232-247. [online], http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html.