I was looking at Chickering and Ehrmann’s paper IMPLEMENTING “THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES: Technology as Lever” and wondering how well it ties in with the concepts of e-learning 2.0.
Good practice:
I am trying to think about how blogging can “hit” these principles.
I am envisaging a series of blogs (one per student and one for the tutor?) with everybody using some software like bloglines to manage their reading.
I think this is clearly capable of hitting [1] and [2] by encouraging student-student and tutor-student interaction.
It can hit [3] if the students are asked to address a series of activities in the context of their field of learning.
[4] is encouraged if the activites allow students to feedback about their own learning experience and tutors to feedback to students their perceptions of how the students are learning.
[5] can be encouraged if the system is used outside formal sessions. Not sure how best to encourage this, clearly intrinsic motivation is best but some element of extrinsic motivation [ links to assessment] might be necessary, at least at first.
I am not so sure about how [6] and [7] can be hit explicitly as a consequence of using a blogging tool. Clearly it depends on how the tool is used with students but it seems to me that other on-line tools would need to be used allow diversity. Perhaps [6] can be encouraged by the way that the tutor responds to posts by students but a balnce needs to be struck between encouragement and inhibition in the tutor posts and comments.
