Tips for Student Bloggers

Blogging provides a learning setting for network-building and knowledge-construction.
Upon embarking on your blogging journey, consider the following in your first few posts.

1. Reflect on anticipated roles – what blogging can achieve for you.

2. Acknowledge that you will be feeling confusion and ambivalence over the features of the technology, and be willing to share this ambivalence and ask questions of others.

3. Participate in your own explorations of Attitudes and Assumptions through a series of “Pause-Points”

4. Give yourself permission to experiment, and give permission to be passionate and creative, and approach the blogging activities with a willingness to creating your own personal record of the learning process.

5. Be open to offering examples, demonstrating other genres not part of cohort, and engaging in group learning.

6. Consider your expectations and commitment levels when setting tasks;

7. Provide yourself with scaffolds, or supports, to guide your path-making activities so you can save time quickly re-tracing your steps when you need to gain access to the same types of information again later on in the term.

8. Draw from one’s own mentor’s toolkit (such as their blog-roll, categories, tag cloud, embeedded links, and suggestions of resources weaved into their responses) and take stock and itemize your own resources (ie. bookmarks, resource links, RSS feeds)

9. Find out more about your own blogging preferences: for example, are you more of a private blogger, or are you motivated by the likelihood of interaction with others?

10. Identify your own goals and formulate a personal learning mission and vision
-what do you want to promote for yourself, and fellow learners?
* self-regulated learning?
* group learning?
* creative sharing?
* role model for others?

11. Showcase own products of learning, and engage in sense-giving so that others can participate alonside you, even passively. You can find a great deal of benefit in writing for an audience, and this shifts your perspectives slightly so that it differs from when you write for yourself only, or just for your instructor.

12. Share with other learners the act of co-creating presentations, podcasts, articles, photos

13. Demonstrate blogging skills for sense-making, that is, activities in which you delve more deeply into the work of putting ideas together. The great benefits are not limited to the term; in fact, as you refer back to older entries and reflect on them, a great deal of learning can occur – this often has little to do directly with the actual grades you receive for that course, but will greatly benefit you with later courses.

14. Describe your own processes of ideas development: berry-picking, way-making, path-sharing, sense-making, and sense-sharing

15. Build a toolkit of exemplars to offer working models for blogging. This is probably the most important reason for blogging. It offers a documented trail of excellent examples of your work, all embedded with contextual cues.

16. Take advantage of time to make reflections and model different ways of using blogs to engage in reflection. There are many ways to engage in reflective, connective writing.

17. Engage in Process capture blogging activities: Rehearsals, Iterations, and Digital Footprints (the revisiting of previous entries as an observer, and comment and add/revise ideas in light of new ideas and updated contexts.

18. Model and participate in formation and development of collaborative Memes (the use of questions to promote discussions, and your own replies to these questions provide a structured self-reflective dialogue that others can read and respond to (including yourself at a later time)

19. Feedback: Offer useful feedback to yourself and others; encourage, and relate in meaningful manner to posts; this capacity for openness and truthfulness provides an excercise in authentic sharing of ideas and experiences – each learner re-reads their own activities differently at different points in time in future.

20. Conversation: Engage other learners and your instructor in conversation about unrelated course content – give permission to engage in playful word-play, jokes, personal stories, creative writing and poetry