Why blogging makes sense

A colleague asked me the other day if I would put together a short piece for students about the purpose and value of blogging. I am thinking about this....

Her reason for asking is that blogging is increasingly being used as an assessment tool for certain learning programmes and in one way I guess I should applaud this as an alternative to marking long reports and essays!!

On another level I find it rather sad that we are in danger of turning something that should be learner driven - and for the purpose of enabling learning - into something that is a performance: no doubt with assessment criteria to judge it by..... *sigh*

So why blog? I can only really talk from my own experience here: I have been blogging for a couple of years - at first I created what amounted to an on line journal that only I could read. Then I created this blog so that I could share what I thought were interesting ideas and links with my students, unrestricted by the VLE and the delays and expense involved in getting web developers to amend learning materials.

Later, other colleagues started to read and comment on my blog when I ventured to share the url on my Twitter profile and with various learning communities I have joined. I welcome the comments and feedback I sometimes get, but I still essentially do this for myself and my students.

I find blogging a way of collecting together some of my random reading and learning from the week(s) past and shaping it into something approximating my current understanding. The point is it is a work in progress; reflection-in-action (Schon); an expression of what I am currently learning and how I am making sense of it.

Here's an analogy (I use analogies a lot in my learning and teaching!): alongside my day job, for some reason now obscure even to myself, I am learning Spanish. I read novels in Spanish, dictionary in hand. I read grammar texts and exercise books. I listen to podcasts and BBC audio programmes. There is plenty of content available. However, the real learning comes from conversation (and correspondence) with other people: preferably native Spanish speaking ones, but other learners too, as I practise the formulations learned on paper and test how they stack up in real life. Can I be understood in writing and speaking the language? My Spanish teacher engages me in conversation: as she says, this is the natural way children learn to speak - by listening and copying, practising and hearing forms repeated back to them.


For me blogging is like practising a new language. I read or hear something in the news or via Twitter, or some new experience at work causes me to stop and think about what I am doing. Feedback from others is useful, but maybe the difference between this and learning Spanish is that here I am mainly trying to arrive at some sort of understanding of myself.

Blogging gives me a pause for some sense-making out of a busy week torn between absorbing and producing.

I guess the point about using blogs in education is not that they are an alternative to assessment, but that they can be a) a dialogue with oneself about ongoing learning and b) potentially - a way of developing a conversation with a guide or mentor about that learning. If tutors are prepared to enter into that dialogue, reflect back what they are hearing, ask stimulating questions, and model good sense-making behaviours themselves, then the learner can grow through their blogging and learn more still.

As the quote above says: its not educational content that is the scarce resource, its the educators who make time to have these sense-making conversations.

Finally - another snippet from my random absorption of content: a report I overheard on the radio that said teachers who themselves write regularly are better at teaching children to be good writers. So yes, lets persuade learners to blog but lets persuade the educators to do so too!!

source: The Open Ed Tech Summit Report 2008. Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.

Trust in teams pt 2

As if in answer to my own questions, I came across this interesting Trust building Model in the Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams, Nemiro et al 2008, Jossey Bass, San Francisco

The three axes for building trust, virtually and in face to face teams are simple:

Competence - believe the team can do the job, involve them in decisions and make sure they have the right skills

Contractual - maintain boundaries, keep agreements, delegate appropriately

Communication - share information, tell the truth, give and receive constructive feedback, admit mistakes, maintain confidentiality

This has helped me to pinpoint where things have been going wrong in a virtual project team I have been working with over the last few weeks:

Specifically, I have had little involvement in key decisions about the project, constructive feedback has been poorly recieved and met with defensiveness rather than an admission that mistakes have been made. Furthermore, deadlines agreed have not been met and promises not kept: my trust in the team is pretty low as a result .....!!!

Is this model useful in pinpointing where trust has been betrayed and what new behaviours might rebuild relationships?

Trust in teams

Conventional wisdom would tell us that trust exists in teams where there have been work and social relationships built up over many years. That it would be difficult to experience trust in a temporary group of people, self selected as members, never meeting face to face and with geographical and cultural differences dividing them.

In a recent survey I carried out in two teams, one co-located and in existence over many years (with normal staff turnover) and the other an "e-community" that came together for the purpose of learning for about 3 months, just the opposite proved to be true.

The co-located team reported negative feelings about working together - such as lack of groundrules, fear of being ridiculed, misunderstanding of one anothers' intentions and rivalry.

The e-community in contrast felt an intuitive understanding of one another, were willing to offer and accept support and felt that relationships were characterised by caring and sharing.

All in all the co-located group gave almost as many negative repsonses (97) as positive (116) in response to 25 questions; the E-community gave a significantly different 189 positive responses to just 13 negative ones.

An interesting study* of why people share information in on-line communities of practice demonstrates that a desire to enhance one's public profile or reputation may hold the key, but not especially any need to have the sharing reciprocated. But this doesn't really explain why we may feel more trusting of, more connected to relative strangers than we do to the people with whom we share an office.

Obviously, in the history of any long term relationship there are difficulties, knock backs, betrayals and disappointments along with the friendships and sharing. A short lived, on line group, just like a weekend conference or a holiday romance, may allow us to get to know one another intensely but superficially, without the burden of a long term "commitment". We show one another our best sides, just as we can carefully choose the picture that goes on our profile page and what we write about our lives.

Familiarity, we know, breeds contempt.

So is there a solution for co-located teams that have intransigent "personality clashes" or other dysfunctions to deal with?

And what are the prospects for long term virtual teams - will the same problems begin to arise over time, and can they be avoided?

One significant factor in my experience is the role of leadership: in the E-community there was excellent facilitation from a team of volunteers who encouraged me to join in, to find like minded people to talk to, and who modelled respect and helpfulness. I had a lot of support and guidance when I needed it, and a lot of freedom to explore and to make mistakes. The deadlines for completion of tasks were also clear and immutable. However, everyone took responsibility for themselves, for completing the task and for building trusting relationships with others.

A team leader can model respect and maintain boundaries that stamps on petty bickering and promotes greater democracy - for example, another "conventional" team I am a part time member of has monthly "socials" and a rotates chairing of the team meetings which are short, focussed and frequent.

So if you are leading a team, ask yourself - are you helping trust to develop? Are you supporting the team to learn, connect and take risks? And are you also maintaining clear boundaries about acceptable behaviour, deadlines and quality of work?

What other factors are there which help teams to develop trust and to maintain it over time? And maybe an important question to ask is, what are the trust killers? By exploring those factors which destroy trust in a team, perhaps we can develop a working model of how to promote it instead.

*McLure Wasko,M; Faraj,S Why should I share? Examining social Capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice MIS Quarterly Vol. 29 No. 1/March 2005

Collaborative Learning

image: flickr Andross

Rewriting the introduction to the Virtual Teams Module this week and, more particularly, redesigning the process.


I want this to be an interactive and collaborative module which simulates virtual team working, so I am asking students to work together in small teams, on a project of their choosing and to present their final work electronically (as we never meet face to face on this module!)

In the midst of my ruminations on this I was given an idea for a blog post by my Twitter compañero @ffolliet :

"The sadness about education is that clever people can't always share their wisdom".

I think what he meant was that some very knowledgeable teachers are not very good at expressing and sharing what they know - and that is certainly true.

There is a famous cycle of learning that shows the learner moving through unconscious incompetence ("I don't know what I don't know" - the pre-learner) through conscious incompetence ("aaagh! I am terrible at this!" - the beginning learner) onto conscious competence ("hey! I am getting the hang of /pretty good at this!" - the apprentice) and finally to unconscious competence ( "I can do this in my sleep" - the Expert).

Teachers, it is alleged, are worse than useless if they are at the Expert stage because they have forgotten the struggles of learning, do not necessarily know how to help someone get to their elevated levels and can't understand why someone else is struggling to grasp the point. (see my earlier post on The Curse of Knowledge).

I think though when I first read this Tweet I immediately leaped to another interpretation: how difficult we make it in education for very clever, knowledgeable and experienced students to share their knowledge.

In Distance Learning with mature, work based students I think it only fair to assume that students will have valuable skills, knowledge and experience to share and to build upon - so why should I think I am the only person worth listening to? - or assume that the set texts and articles I am recommending are the only knowledge worth sharing?

In Action Learning (and similarly in Person Centred approaches to teaching and coaching) we start from the premise that the "client" knows where it hurts and how to fix it - they just need help in articulating & acting on that knowledge.

So - just as @ffolliet's comment on Twitter stimulated me to write this blog and share something that deep inside I have known for a long time, just maybe forgotten - with a well timed question or prompt we can all bring out the cleverness inside each other. Student-directed groups, action learning sets, wikis for collaborative writing are all spaces where we can do this.

This isn't signalling mass unemployment for academics - just that the role has to change from being the clever person in the room who has all the answers to being the one who knows how to encourage everyone to ask clever questions of one another.

Peer assessment

image: flickr chrissuderman

Not been on the blog for a while - holiday in Spain took precedence, I am afraid!

So today just a few thoughts about peer assessment as I am contemplating the topic for an assignment I am writing. This has led me to some interesting reading: predominantly Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education by Boud and Falchikov (2007: Routledge)

The main arguments against peer assessment seem to be concern for the reliability of the marking process and consequent need for training of the students. I would add that it is also deeply unpopular amongst students who generally would much rather hand over total responsibility for the process to tutors - so as not to be put in the position of sitting in judgement on their friends and colleagues ( or even on themselves: self assessment is no less unpopular in my experience).

In favour is the real world analogy - in their working lives students (and particularly work based/distance learning/ mature students) are already involved in the business of peer and colleague assessment in the course of their work - checking reports, carrying out staff appraisals, NVQ assessing, supervising another's practice.

Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that learning with & from peers is the most natural way we pick up new ideas and information (that's certainly why I blog, Twitter, diigo and wiki every day!), which is certainly an argument for collaborative learning if not peer assessment. And it furthers life long learning: if we can turn to friends and colleagues for coaching and feedback as we approach new challenges in our work or even in our hobbies, we continue the process of reflection and informal learning almost without being aware of it.

So how do we make it work?

Some ideas from Nancy Falchikov include

1. sharing the assessment criteria or


2. even better, designing such criteria with the students


3. training or scaffolding so that assessment skills are developed over time and not sprung as a surprise (and a big scary task) right at the end of the course

In another place in the book, there is a chapter on assessment and emotion. It is important not to forget how emotionally fraught assessment (judgement) is. Awaiting the marks on an assignment is deeply stressful for some: we feel we are being judged for who we are, not what we wrote/created. Getting those marks from a tutor allows us a measure of distance: we can be angry at them or the system if we are disappointed. Being judged by our peers may actually be more terrifying!!

In my own experience I have had mixed feelings about peer assessment. It was a system used widely in training for counsellors and because we worked in "triads" with peer observers of counselling practice at every workshop for three years, we all became relatively skilled at and relaxed with the practice. The final assessment with peer assessment on the practice portfolio was consequently less daunting.

However, at its worst, peer assessment puts the peer in the authority position and encourages them to take on the prevalent culture of whatever educational institution they have experienced: if their own experience of assessment is largely critical or punitive, peers will mirror this. Tutors therefore have to train students not only in the mechanics of assessment, but need also to model how it is applied - with fairness, humility, self awareness and respect for the student being assessed.

Hmmmm - training the institution's markers sounds like the FIRST step!!