Web Logs and Online Discussions as Tools to Promote Reflective Practice

     This piece is aimed at both current teachers and future teachers and it's objective is to deal with the lack of communication between the different levels of the education system. Throughout the article, blogs and online discussions are highlighted as a proposed remedy to this problem as they encourage collaboration and reflective practice.

     He says that school teachers today arrive into their profession with expectations that differ greatly to the reality of their work. What they subsequently find is that, they do not have any control over what or how they teach their students. They are confined by deadlines and a strict curriculum in most instances. The result is that many abandon the profession within their first five years of qualifying. To prevent this from happening, graduates from teaching programs, or any discipline for that matter, need to learn independently how to become more than just information transmitters.

     We are already learning in our classes that technology is the way to close the gap between academic professionals around the world and that it also helps to make intellectual discussions and research available to a wider network. Now we can also see that not only does it allow us to participate in a larger community but that it can also aid in our own personal development. This article helps to explain to our class why blogs and online discussions are so relevant to us as historians. We can evaluate and reflect on our work and eventually learn how to be more independently productive students.

     He explains how electronic media is vital in today's education system, not only because it benefits us personally but because it crosses the barriers of time, scheduling and geography. Blogs and discussion groups are generally in the public forum so the author faces a "potentially large and unknown audience". He explains, and I agree, that this is a key motivating factor for students to engage with the work and also means that they are less likely to write just what the instructor wants to hear if they know that their peers will be reading it too.  For teachers, online discussions allow them to work outside the confines of the classroom. According to the references in this article many teachers feel that they are in an isolated job with a "heavy burden of private responsibility". Hopefully  the new methods being used will help to change this opinion.

     He talks in detail for a while about a class of 56 students that created online blogs as part of their university coursework. Overall the experiment appears to have been a success. The students were taught the values of the different types of electronic communication, their posts turned out to be of high quality and they ultimately developed the sense that they too could be considered as real contributers to the academic world.

     I think that online blogs are a great idea especially for larger classes. We can learn to present ourselves with confidence and voice our ideas even if we are too shy to speak out in class.