Tan,
A. (2005). Does blogging have a place in teacher education?
Incorporating blogs and determining their effectiveness in PIHnet.
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for
Information Technology and Teacher Education, Phoenix, AZ.
This
paper summarises the uses of weblogs (blogs) in education and
highlights how they have been used to promote reflective writing.
Research gaps in reflective educational blogging are highlighted
and a study is proposed to determine if blogs promote preservice
teacher reflection.
I
was in the process of refining my dissertation research prospectus
when I wrote this paper. I had initially planned on measuring
reflection by in-service teachers involved with PIHnet. However,
I later relied on a larger pool of preservice teachers from
Indiana University.
The
three primary reasons for writing this paper were to:
1) provide an overview of blog use in education,
2) identify research gaps in educational blogging, and
3) describe the design of my dissertation research on reflective
blogging by preservice teachers.
The
research entailed an extensive and comparative literature
review in three broad areas:
1) the uses of blogs in K-12 and higher education contexts
2) the extent of blog use to promote reflective writing
2) the design of previous studies on blogging to determine
(if at all) the effectiveness of promoting reflection
I
prepared another manuscript based on developments that took
place between paper submission and actual presentation at
SITE. I presented a similar paper at the 2005 IST conference
and retitled it "Educational blogging: Much ado about
something? (Or a review of blogging in education and a research
agenda)". The paper, provided below, was retitled
for SITE as such, but the title was not updated in the proceedings.