Language Teacher Education
5. The blog project: creating reading diaries
information others contribute, and that the final outcome could also result in an unconnected list of various teaching ideas. Surprisingly, two groups did not use the text surface of their sub-page at all, but posted their ideas right into the dis- cussion feed –again in an unconnected way without referring to or commenting on previous discussion points. In their reflections, the students who produced these types of outcome stressed that still they had produced a list of teaching advice that might potentially be useful, but remarked that this list was not neces- sarily reliable because the knowledge it represented was not double-checked or critically edited. The same students also recognized, especially in comparison to the first group described, that they had not fully exploited the potential that a wiki holds in store and that they had engaged with the collaboration task rather superficially. To improve their work, some students suggested that an even more careful introduction to the purposes and processes of the wiki might be necessary and that face-to-face classroom sessions could also have been used for interven- tions and reflections to show other paths of use of a wiki –rather than making the wiki collaboration an independent project with little or no guidance during the process. Other students added that precisely because they had not collaborated in an ideal way they were now more aware of what is actually important when creating a shared outcome on a wiki.
grow exponentially with the result that the Meriam-Webster Publisher elected
“Weblog” to be the word of the year 2004 (cf. Richardson 2010).
To put blogs to productive and collaborative use across the two university classrooms, the idea of keeping a reading diary, an established method for teach- ing literature in foreign language classrooms, was transferred to a participative Web 2.0 context for students to create their own reading diary as a blog. In this scenario, two aspects that are typical of reading diaries were altered: normally, reading diaries are kept as an individual reflection on the experience of reading a literary text and they are usually private texts not intended to be shared with a larger audience. Instead of being an individual result, the reading diary blog was now designed to be a collaborative product by several authors, all with access to the same blog, and all with the right to publish on it. Even though each entry was published by an individual student, it was the sum of all these individual entries that made the whole reading diary blog a shared piece of work, turning the reading diary into a multi-voiced, yet highly personal record in which diverse opinions on and experiences of the same literary text conjoined. Secondly, all groups decided to keep their blogs public, thus opening up their personal reflections to a wider audience and other classroom peers. With this openness of the reading diary blog, further discussions were able to unfold: followers could comment on the entries and engage with the authors to confirm or challenge the content of their entries, turning the reading diary blog into an interactive and dialogic platform.
The student groups were able to choose freely which literary text they wanted to read and turn into a blog diary, provided that they had never read that particular text before. Similarly, they could decide on which blog provider they wanted to use to set up and maintain their blog, a choice which required some research on the suitability of available blog providers (e.g. free of cost, allowing for multiple authorship). The students had four weeks to agree on a literary text, set up the blog, and bring it to life with entries on their reading experience. They were further encouraged to comment on each other’s entries and share their blog to create an audience for their product. In addition, the students were introduced to the concept of a reading diary in class and studied pedagogical publications on reading diaries and weblogs (e.g. Raith 2006; Klemm 2008) so that they had a range of ideas on text contents and what to publish in the entries (e.g. an indi- vidual response to the text, filling the gaps of the text, re-writing a situation from a different perspective, presenting songs associated with the text, creating visual collages etc.).
Figure 1: Example of students’ reading diary blog
After four weeks, the students presented their results in class and reflected on their experience of creating a collaborative reading diary blog. Among the literary texts chosen for the blog were Annie Proulx’ Brokeback Mountain (cf. Figure 1 for the result of this reading diary), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Each blog was in itself a unique collection of entry types, some with a more analytical or interpretative approach, some with a more creative focus.
While all entries contained written text, many students also embedded images, songs and audio files, excerpts from videos or added hyperlinks to other sources in their entries making the blogs a multimodal and multimedia experience. In some cases, students also added other literary texts such as poems or they chose information in the wider socio-cultural context related to the literary text they had read. Students unanimously agreed that they enjoyed the freedom of choice regarding the content of the entries (‘what to write about’) and that they could follow up ideas they found interesting, meaning that all students were committed to their individual entries because they were felt to be personally meaningful. In reflecting on the collaboration, some students pointed out that the reading diary blog, in contrast to the wiki, allowed greater independence from the other group members, but still there was a sense of collaborative achievement in the end be- cause the blog could only come to life with all contributions merged, and the blog as a whole was more than the sum of its parts, i.e. its individual entries. In the course of reading other entries with their unique contributions and reflections,
several students found the experience enriching as it added new dimensions to the perceptions of the literary text they had hitherto held.
While the students certainly enjoyed their in-depth engagement with the lit- erary texts and found working on the reading diary blog enriching due to the possibility of expressing their own opinions, several students remarked critically that their hopes of having an audience which actually followed the blog had been dashed. Although none of the students minded the fact that the blogs were public per se –quite the contrary, this lead many students to put more effort into the quality and the language of the entries– the sense of a missing audience caused many students to wonder about whom they were actually writing for, and what sense their writing had if nobody but the group members actually followed the blog entries. As blogs do not only rely on the voices expressed on this platform, but also on an audience that engages with these voices, some students called into question the purpose of creating a blog at all. If used in their own future class- rooms, the students agreed that strategies would be necessary to find and increase the audience for a blog, e.g. by sharing it on social networking sites, advertising it to friends, or encouraging other classes (e.g. by using the project eTwinning) to follow their example. This would be facilitated if the time-span were longer, i.e.
over the course of a school term.
At the end of term and after completion and presentation of the collaborative products (the classroom wiki and reading diary blogs), students were asked to complete an online survey once more using the survey tool SurveyMonkey. They were asked to evaluate the social media they had used and give their opinion on the suitability of incorporating social media in the classroom for language learn- ing purposes. A total of 21 students completed the survey (11 from Muenster, 10 from Karlsruhe). The participants evaluated the use of wikis both as suitable (16) and as very suitable (4 students), and only one student was of the opinion that wikis were not a suitable tool for language learning purposes. Similar results showed for the use of blogs: 18 students evaluated these as very suitable while 3 students rated them as suitable. This shows that the teacher candidates of these university courses are generally open-minded towards using these social media in their future classrooms. Having experienced the use of these media themselves in the context of this teacher education course, while simultaneously critically reflecting on that use, might be seen as an important step in the professionalisa- tion of future teachers when it comes to implementing online media in learning scenarios.