Blogs, Reflection and Learner-Centred Design

In reading a recent post on the Tomorrow’s Professor blog regarding “Learning Through Structured Reflection,” I’ve been once again reminded of my passionate belief in the importance of leaving space and opportunity for contemplation and critical thinking in the learning process. Likewise the article has also reaffirmed my belief that the student blog should be as core a part of a curriculum as the text book.

The article argues:

“Making experiences into objects of reflection means simultaneously heightening their impact while attempting to understand them in connection with any number of other thing: concepts, issues or experiences arising from other course components; one’s past academic learning or personal history; one’s values, assumptions, and convictions; theoretical or other conceptual or analytic lenses, and the like. In the process, students observe, analyze, examine, and consider their political experiences from multiple points of view.”

There is enormous power in the examination of an idea or experience from multiple points of view, and placing it in different contexts. Each new variable that you inject adds a new dynamic to the equation that can provide additional insight and depth in its own unique way.

Tangential Learning

Whereas the article in Tomorrow’s Professor describes structured reflection, in my experience, this is equally relevant to tangential, unstructured learning as well. Instead of trying to avoid becoming sidetracked, you embrace conceptual tangents and explore them to see where you end up. You start asking yourself questions like: “How does X relate to W?  How does it differ from Z?  Where is the conflict between A and B? Where are the areas of compliment?  What’s MY view on the discussion?  What are my experiences with it?  What other literature or research might expand on these ideas?  What do I not understand about this discussion? What further information do I need to provide clarity?”

Placed in this context, you quickly begin to appreciate the complexities of different situations or debates, which in turn can feed back into the reflexive, critical thinking processes – indeed, this can inspire a greater degree of engagement because you are driving the exploration.

Cultivating Critical Thinking

Yet this sort of critical thinking doesn’t necessarily come easy to people. It needs to be strengthened, developed and cultivated. It also needs to become embedded in practice. However relying on the occasional essay or term paper is not going to achieve this; it needs to be a far more integral part of the learning process.

Herein lay the significance and importance of the personal journal – in particular, the blog. It provides a space that the learner owns and controls. They dictate what’s included, how it’s framed, categorised and organised, how it’s recalled, and how it’s used later.

The latter is particularly important and significant in the process. By nature blogs provide a record of everything you have written, in a way that is easily browsed and searched, tagged and linked to. They establish a record of where your previous thought processes and experiences have taken you, the conclusions that you’ve come to, the questions that remain, and the ideas that beg for further exploration or investigation. They map out historical cognitive journeys in a way that can be revisited and reviewed – and importantly, re-examined using different lenses.

The Issue with Course Blogs

Thus arises my primary criticism agains the course blog – that is, a blog created for temporary use during a single session, in a single course. Maintaining historical context and continuity is critical to the reflective process, and yet the short-term course blog prevents this from happening. Worse still are bastardised quasi-personal journals like those found in locked-down Learning Management Systems (LMS), which sever access to reflections and student work at the end of session and thus prevent any subsequent re-examination from taking place.

To be truly effective, and truly empowering, blogs need to be learner-centric, following the individual throughout their learning journeys – not just in the context of formal, structured courses, but above and beyond that as well.

As the article from Tomorrow’s Professor suggests, proper reflection considers far more holistic elements, including “…concepts, issues or experiences arising from other course components; one’s past academic learning or personal history; one’s values, assumptions, and convictions; theoretical or other conceptual or analytic lenses, and the like.”

Reflection is bigger and more encompassing than the boundaries of formal education, therefore the spaces that facilitate and document this reflection need to be as well. But even more than that, reflection requires the cultivation of a mindset and a culture that values exploration and investigation and which recognises the interrelated, interdependent, complex nature of learning and the learning process.

Rethinking Learning Spaces

At the very least, blogs need to be implemented at the degree level – started at day one when the student first arrives on campus, carried with them throughout the multi-year duration of their studies, and then taken with them into their post-graduate lives. Blogs need to mirror the reality and experiences of the students, not the plans and structures of the courses they’re in.

Having said that, there is no reason why organically evolving, learner-centred blogs can’t be used to support structured reflections, course assignments, or even assessments. Indeed, I believe blogs are one of the most appropriate places for it.

What is required though, is a fundamental rethinking of the idea of learning spaces to recognise distributed, learner-centric designs, and then having done that, a look at the available mechanisms – such as RSS and tagging – that will enable courses, programs or instructors to filter out only the content that is relevant to them and re-purpose it in a format that will streamline administrative, assessment, or grading requirements of the course.

Learner-centred design need not come at the expense of curriculum or instructor sanity, it just requires some creative thinking.