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1
Acceptance, Usage, and Communication Patters of a Blogging Exercise for Students
Ulrich SchraderFrankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt am Main, Germanymail@ulrich-schrader.de
Abstract:
In Germany openly accessible blogs for student education on the undergraduate level arestill not very common. After explaining the ideas behind using a blog students were given theassignment to post at least two own entries and to comment at least five times on an openlyaccessible blog during the semester. The blog was centred on a common topic and all students wereinvited to the blog. At first students where a little apprehensive about their entries being visible byfellow students and also on a worldwide scale, but at the same time they liked the idea about writingfor a larger audience than just their professor. While most of them choose to use a different authorname to post, some of them still used their real name or an identifying abbreviation. In general thestyle of writing seemed to have improved. Although the blog was available for about 5 months morethan half of the students did use a timeframe of on month or less to fulfil their assignment and did notuse the blog as a means for ongoing communication. Problems in using the blog were partly causedby students first writing their post using a word processor and using elaborate formatting which did notsurvive the cut and paste operations. Since students were commenting the work their fellow studentsthe resulting communications patterns where analyzed. Some group building did appear in thepattern. The hypothesis that the group building was caused by a common topic could not be held.Rather some clustering was seen by students posting at about the same time. This can be interpretedas a means to reduce workload. In looking for a fitting entry to comment on they started at the mostrecent one and worked their way back. The goal to engage the students for a prolonged time couldnot be met for most of the students. Still they considered the exercise a very interesting and engagingone. They particularly liked the idea of using up-to-date technology.
Keywords:
weblog, blog, usage, acceptance, web 2.0.
1. Introduction
Weblogs, later abbreviated as blogs started out as simple diaries organizing entries (posts) in areverse chronological order. They allowed others to comment on each entry. Due to their ease of usethey attracted a large community of bloggers, who made up the so called blogoshere. With theavailability of providers that allow user to create blogs for free; blogs became a tool ready to be usedby everyone. Going along with the definition of a blog given by Paquet , five features arerepresentative of blogs: personal editorship, a hyperlinked posting structure linking to other entries orcontent on the internet, frequent updates, free public access to the content via the internet, andarchived postings .(Paquet 2003). One important feature that is missing in the list is the RSS-feedautomatically generated by most blogging applications. RSS stands for "really simple syndication", or"rich site summary", or "RDF site summary". It is defined according to the XML standard and allowsfor the easy subscription to blogs by interested users using an application known as a news reader orblogreader. The blogreader has the task to alert the user to new or changed content. A RSS-feedbasically consists at least of three tags: author, link, and description (Bartlett-Bragg 2003).While blogs have been existent since the late nineties in one way or another, it has been only in aboutthe last 3-4 years that they have been applied to educational purposes (Williams 2004). Downesargues that blogs are the most significant technological development in online teaching and learningsince the introduction of enterprise level learning management systems (LMS) (Downes 2004).Farmer and Bartlett-Bragg they cite in their review examples of educational blogs that were notsuccessful in some aspects (Farmer and Bartlett-Bragg 2005). Partly some problems were cause byfunctional deficiencies of the blogging application used.In this paper the use of a blogging exercise is described. Since the blogging application records thedates of all entries, it was tried to analyze the data for patterns of usage. There is very little in theliterature about how and when are students reacting to a blogging exercise.
 
2. Method
In the winter semester of 2006/2007 a class of 29 nurse management students were given theassignment to engage actively in a group blog. Their prior experiences in using web applicationsranged from very little to experienced.It was a similar design to that used by Cooper and Boddington. (Cooper and Boddington 2005).Thefreely available blogging application Blogger was also chosen as platform. The major difference toCooper and Boddington was the group size. They had only 5 students per group, while in thisassignment all 29 student became members of the blog. It was set to be openly available to read foreveryone interested. Also there were no restrictions for outsiders to comment. A captcha mechanismwas enabled to prevent automatic spambots from commenting.The students in this track do differ from the regular students at the university since the nursingmanagement track has as a prerequisite several years of working experience at a management level.During their studies they are still part time employed. This results in most students being in theirthirties or forties. They had never actively used or posted to a blog. So they did no have any priorexperience.All 29 student were invited to join the blog. For the assignment the students had to post each twoentries on the group blog and to write five comments. The assignment was open from November 17
th
,2006 to April 18
th
, 2007- a total of 153 days. The blog was centered on a common topic. In order towrite a post the students had to research literature or the internet for sources that mentionadvantages of nursing information systems over traditional paper based solutions and write a shortcritical appraisal of the source and its contents. After the deadline of the blog the dates of each entryand all comments were determined and analyzed in order to find patterns in the usage of the blog.
3. Results3.1 Reactions to the assignment
After a first explanation of the assignment some students where a little apprehensive about theirentries being visible by fellow students and also on a worldwide scale, but at the same time they likedthe idea about writing for a larger audience than just their professor. Since they were allowed to usealiases as their blog identity it did not pose a problem to them. In the end all aliases were uncoveredamong the students themselves. Being visible did trigger a discussion about professionalism andusing real names on the internet. Four students ended up using identifying names as being at leastthe family name and the initials of the first name. The other students did use their first name or anickname known to the group (16), or a fantasy name (9).Some students were quite surprised when the first external visitor did leave a comment on the blogwithin about one week after the first post did appear. During the whole time period there were fiveexternal visitors. This number is quite low but understandable as the blog was not actively promotedat that time.
3.2. Start of the student's activity
Considering the long timeframe for completing the assignment it was interesting to analyze the datethey posted or commented for the first time on the blog. This is described in figure 1.
 
Cummulative frequency of students started with exercise
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        1        7  .        1        1  .        2        0        0        6        2        4  .        1        1  .        2        0        0        6        0        1  .        1        2  .        2        0        0        6        0        8  .        1        2  .        2        0        0        6        1        5  .        1        2  .        2        0        0        6        2        2  .        1        2  .        2        0        0        6        2        9  .        1        2  .        2        0        0        6        0        5  .        0        1  .        2        0        0        7        1        2  .        0        1  .        2        0        0        7        1        9  .        0        1  .        2        0        0        7        2        6  .        0        1  .        2        0        0        7        0        2  .        0        2  .        2        0        0        7        0        9  .        0        2  .        2        0        0        7        1        6  .        0        2  .        2        0        0        7        2        3  .        0        2  .        2        0        0        7        0        2  .        0        3  .        2        0        0        7        0        9  .        0        3  .        2        0        0        7        1        6  .        0        3  .        2        0        0        7        2        3  .        0        3  .        2        0        0        7        3        0  .        0        3  .        2        0        0        7
Date
     N    u    m     b    e    r    o     f    s     t    u     d    e    n     t    s
Figure 1:
Cumulative frequency of students having been activeIt can clearly be seen that a small group of students (4) got involved in the first week of theassignment. Interestingly three students did start two days before the Christmas holiday. This doescorrespond to the quite demanding part time work since most students work as nurse managers inhealthcare institutions. But the most amazing fact is that almost half of the students did procrastinateuntil after the end of the semester break. Taking a closer look reveals that the steep increase in thecurve does correspond to a day at the computer lab where a 10 minutes problem solving sessionrelated to issues around using the blog was given. It did turn out that there were three majorhandicaps with the use of the blog:
The process of getting an account with Blogger and later Google was not understood. Someinvitation mails got lost. Some did not answer to the mail confirming the email address.
Student were sometimes not aware that the learning management system of the universityand Blogger were different entities and required different usernames and passwords.
Quite a few students were writing their posts offline using a word processor. Unfortunately thecopy and paste procedure does also copy some formatting information resulting sometimes inan undesired appearance of the post.One drawback of the late sign-on of the students was that the process had to be explained quiteoften.
3.2. Duration of the activity
Another different question was how long students were taking to complete the assignment. Since itwas explained that being active in a blog is an ongoing endeavor, that a blog is not just a means forpublishing, but also for communication, it was considered better practice to be active (posting andcommenting) for a prolonged period of time. Unfortunately for this case study it was not possible todetermine to what extent students did return to the blog after having completed their assignment, ifthey did not post or comment. Figure 2 displays the frequency of the time students were taking tocomplete their assignment.
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