This is a brief case study of one learner’s use of the blogging tool this past summer. The instructional period was about 6 weeks. This learner was an adult literacy learner taking a self-paced course in technical writing at the College. I suggested he make use of blogging to capture the writing process in more detail.
Here is a link to the student’s blog, Matt0Musings.
I was working with him over the summer for about a month on his writing skills, and used the blogging tool to walk him through the steps, and have him reflect on the writing process. I had him make a scanned copy of his notes, add photos, summarize articles, and develop his essays using his blog. I gave regular comments to his posts. It is in fact a sliver of an example of how the blogging tool can be utilized to encourage self-assessment and encourage dialogue between the student and the educator. But blogs are only a tool that cannot alone be successful – the combination of the appropriate technology (blogging) with an instructional strategy that makes use of exemplars, dialogue, open revisions, multiple drafts, rubrics, and encouraging self-talk and ideas-capture demonstrates, in my view, real learning and skills-building.