The use of blogs in higher education for the purpose of enhancing teaching and learning has not seen such phenomenal growth. Nonetheless, like many technology solutions, there are some very interesting pockets of innovative and effective educational blogging taking place today. Two such pockets are at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio and at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

Barbara Ganley, a lecturer in the Writing Program and English at Middlebury College, can be considered one of the grandmothers of blog usage in higher education. She has been adding blogs, as well as other "New Media" technologies, to her face-to-face writing classes and workshops at Middlebury since 2001.

Changing the Traditional One-to-Many Teaching Model

In a presentation she gave with Barbara Sawhill, director of the Cooper International Learning Center and Spanish instructor at Oberlin College, at the January 2007 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting (see link at end of article), Ganley explained why she adopted blogging as one of her primary teaching and learning tools. She began the ELI presentation by quoting and referencing a good number of academics whom have written about how faculty have traditionally attempted to engage students in higher education, and how teaching and learning, in general, are in desperate need of change. "We cling to romantic notions and traditions of teaching and learning that never necessarily serve our students well in the first place," Ganley said. "We continue to teach the same material in the same way, in a one-to-many broadcast model as though we are the last bastions of saneness, of critical thinking and scholarship."

She went on to say that with the appropriate use of blogs and other educational technologies, such as podcasting and digital storytelling, the aforementioned traditional notions no longer apply. In short, Ganley incorporates such stuff into her writing courses in a manner that pulls back the controls of the learning dynamic, "moving away from the lecture and what we call discussion, to conversation and collaboration, to creation and communication." Interesting! How does she do it?

Starting with the Motherblog

It starts, for example, in a Writing Workshop I course, with a "Motherblog" – Ganley’s center where the course subject matter, syllabus and most student comments and discussions reside. Mandatory individual student blogs surround the Motherblog. The process begins with Ganley noting at the outset that she will not be lecturing from the front of the classroom while students sit back and take notes. Instead, students are required to post informal and formal writing to the course blogs, create and post a course-assignment-related podcast, focus on "the art of revision," explore his/her own writing process and "work together to grow as seminar listeners, responders, presenters, collaborators and editors."

The podcast assignments are a variety of five-minute oral reports that students record on loaned iPods and upload onto the Motherblog. Ganley facilitates course discussions and participation on the Motherblog during the first two weeks of the class. By the third week, she is no longer the primary person posting to the blog as students are required to take charge by initiating and continuing discussions on the Motherblog.

Losing Control Is A Good Thing

Ganley says that integrating social software into her writing classes brings about a loss of control on her part, which is actually a good thing. In a recent interview with EdPath, she explained that "once I incorporate blogs, kids begin talking about their ideas in the classroom and sharing their work. Real peer-to-peer learning goes on, changing the dynamic of the class profoundly. I no longer have absolute control. I become much more of a mentor and a guide and a co-learner. It has allowed me to really center the students and have them take a lot more responsibility for their work."

Changing Foreign Language Courses

Sawhill voices very similar results for the conversational Spanish classes she teaches at Oberlin. Sawhill started incorporated blogs into her courses in January 2006. Like Ganley, she has become a true believer and outspoken proponent on the effectiveness of these tools.

In her ELI presentation, Sawhill set the stage by explaining how the research on higher education foreign language teaching and learning shows that there is a big need for change. For example, it takes about 720 hours of "contact time" for a person to become proficient (not fluent) in a language that mirrors one’s native tongue, such as English and the romance languages. For languages that do not mirror each other, such as English and Chinese, it takes three times longer to become proficient. She adds that in a typical foreign language class of 18 to 20 students that meets three times a week for a total of 150 minutes, students will only get about 6 minutes of actual contact time to learn the language - obviously not enough.

Additionally, Sawhill referred to "Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum," by Janet Swaffar and Katherine Arens, noting that students in foreign language curriculums typically become proficient in grammar and vocabulary during their first two years of study, but these proficiencies are not melded together with their conversational language studies that take place during their third and fourth years. Plus, the teaching and learning of cultural literacy is often lacking throughout the entire curriculum. Sawhill also referred to common and ineffective teacher-centric habits of foreign language instruction that are based on completing text-book chapters and workbook assignments under the pressure of semester timelines.

Exploring Social Software and More

"I began to explore how social software could help break some of these things," she said. "I wanted to look at how social software and mobile technology could improve contact time in the language and provide meaningful, rich and rigorous directed learning in a second language. I also wanted to go back to this idea of cultural literacy. . ."

Enter recording-enabled iPods, Skype (a free voice over Internet protocol tool) and blogs . . .

In a similar class format as Ganley’s, Sawhill’s conversational Spanish course also has a Motherblog for course activities and interactions that is surrounded by individual student blogs. All blog posts and interactions, however, are strictly in Spanish. Students are also loaned iPods with microphones for assignments that require them to listen to Spanish music and poetry and for recording their Spanish-speaking oral reports that they upload to their personal blogs. Sawhill’s class also uses Skype in creative ways, which has proven to be a boom for facilitating live, interactive language-speaking contact time with native speakers in other parts of the world.

Connections

"The blogs and Skype allow us the opportunity to keep in contact with the language," Sawhill says. "Because the blogs are wide open (public to the world online), we have people visiting us from Spain, from Columbia, from Argentina – classes of ESL students coming in and talking to my students in Spanish as well as in English because they want to practice speaking English."

These Skype connections are first initiated in several ways. One is through an organization called "WebHeads in Action," a world-wide, cross-cultural, online community of ESL educators. Another is through "The Mixxer," a free educational site out of Dickinson College for language learners and teachers to find a partners for language exchanges via Skype connections. Sawhill explains that, in addition to her class connecting with other classes for language exchanges, her students have established online language exchanges with individuals in other countries on their own.

Overall, the blog posts and Skype exchanges have created a kind of snowball effect in which more exchanges between English and Spanish speakers seeking contact time are further developed and nurtured. "What’s amazing about blogs is that it just takes a little while for the news to get around, and then we have other people coming in. Now we have four classes of ESL students in Spanish-speaking countries that are constantly visiting my students’ blogs, challenging them in terms of their oral language." She adds that her students challenge their counterparts as well. "There’s this wonderful collaboration going on."

An Amazing Transformation

Sawhill adds that she spends a good amount of face-to-face time during her conversational Spanish classes in getting input from her students about how the class should be structured and developed over time, how their voices should be presented on their blogs and what it feels like to write in a second language and get a response from someone who is correcting their mistakes. "The class time is incredibly charged," she says. Additionally, a lot of the badly needed contact time has spilled over to outside of class. "I’ve seen them in my lab. I’ve heard about what they’ve been doing in their dorm rooms. They are talking for hours on end on Skype. My whole reason for using these tools is not to force them down their throats, but to say ‘here are some different ways in which you can use the language, and I want each of you to find something that is comfortable for you. But I also want you to find something that is going to cause you to use it outside of this classroom so that inside of the classroom becomes more important and much more beneficial.’"

A Changed Teacher

At the ELI session, Sawhill explained how these online social-network-oriented interchanges have ultimately affected her teaching and her students in profound ways. "As a teacher, amazing things happen when you throw open the doors and the windows of your classroom and let that outside world in and the inside world out. Amazing things happen when you ask students what they want to learn, how they want to learn and what works for them." By asking students to comment and reflect on their own work, as well as on the work of others, including their teacher - and all completed strictly in the target language – "incredible things happen as you reconnect their language proficiencies and let them reinforce each other instead of working in isolation."

Sawhill added that incorporating blogs that force students to write in a second language ultimately helps students to speak better. One student, for instance, mentioned to her that the amount of an individual’s blog writing completed in the class was the equivalent in length to a 50-page academic paper. This student (and others) write much more in their second language then they would normally have written in a traditional conversational class because they are more invested and interested in writing on a blog.

No More School Books

"I am delighted to be able to facilitate an environment where my students engage with a second language and where their cultural literacy skills exceeded their own expectations," Sawhill continued. "I cannot imagine going back to teaching a traditional classroom. I cannot imagine teaching from the textbook again. My student stories and what they came to learn and their reason for learning and their own histories were so much more vibrant that anything I could have bought in a textbook."