Blogging and Research

Tomorrow is our day of food, fun, technology and teaching that we call “Learning, 2007″

I am posting my notes for my own presentation here, partly so Olivia can take a look and we can coordinate better! But I also want to get input from my blogging community. So I plan to follow this post with a post tomrrow that tells how it went!

Catching Students in the Act: Blogs as Windows of Opportunity for Teaching Research Skills

Have you heard a student say “There isn’t anything out there about that–I looked”? Find out what your students consider “looking” and how you can help them to learn to do in depth, excellent research. Technology tools and helpful librarians make it easy!

Presenters:
Terry Dolson, Lucretia McCulley, Olivia Reinauer

Location:
Jepson G23

Blogs and RSS feed

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs

Concept: they use the blog as a place to record observations during their apprenticing, then to develop an area of interest for research, and then to reflect and record during the research process. They have RSS feed of each other’s blogs.  Olivia, our librarian, monitors them through RSS feed as well.
Their end of semester project was to combine their observations of student writers and what they learned through research and create one large document: Portrait of the Student Writer at UR

To facilitate this:
1.they each produced their own individual “research paper”
2.they read each other’s papers
3.they broke into small groups to write portions of the final project paper and then worked together as one large group to refine and present it.

Why a blog? “Research Community”

Blogs are public –one student had a professor from another school commenting and helping her
-they helped each other through Commenting
-they read each other’s posts so they developed a sense of what everyone was doing
“I definitely made a point of reading my peers’ ideas and experiences each week… My knowledge came not only from my personal experiences or even what I learned in class but involved inter- and intra- group discourse and collaboration. …my knowledge and education about tutoring and the writing process has come in part from this online community.” (Eisenberg)

Blogs are convenient:
-students now expect to be able to work whenever and wherever they want; blogs allow this
–they found the blog itself useful:
“I found it extremely helpful to be able to write down something as simple as the search terms I had used… and then be able to create a link to that exact article.” (Lietzau)
–it’s automatic date stamping helped them also with creating the Works Cited later!
It got the students to work on the project for weeks in advance and in more productive ways:
It helped their understanding of “research as a process that involves resorting to other options, fields and topics …I have learned that it is best to think differently when researching in order to find useful sources…” (Joyce)

Blogs are spaces for reflection—somewhere between personal and formal. We came to think of this space as informal but scholarly; “collegial”

Format encouraged understanding of research as a reflective learning process.
1. create a link (if possible–if not, write out a citation)
2. explanation of why you are looking at this source
3. What question(s) does this source help you to answer?
4. What new question(s) do you now have?
5. strategize–what next?

Finally:
-it “brought the library to them” because Olivia was constantly reading the blogs and commenting

-they got my help along the way without having to make an appointment

Next:Olivia goes into specifics