Tool an instrument of great value for educational use

Weblogs have great potential as a tool in the field of teaching, since they can be adapted to any discipline, educational level and teaching methodology. This article analyzes the characteristics of the blog format that favor its use in teaching-learning processes within a constructivist pedagogy and in accordance with the educational needs of the Information and Communication Society (SIC).

In the new educational paradigm it is necessary to “learn to learn”, since training is not limited to a specific space and time, but rather requires maintaining a certain capacity for learning throughout life (long-life learning). Constructivism is nourished by contributions on learning from different theories: from Piaget's cognitive studies and the relevance of social interaction in education defended by Vygotsky, to the currents of educational psychology that highlight the importance of meaningful learning (Ausubel et al., 1990).

Compared to other educational models focused on the transmission of content, constructivism defends that knowledge is a construction of the human being and that it is carried out from the previous schemes that it already has. According to the constructivist pedagogy, the teacher acts as a mediator, providing the necessary instruments so that the student can build their own learning. Therefore, the teacher's ability to diagnose the student's prior knowledge and guarantee a climate of trust and communication in the educational process becomes particularly important.

The characteristics of weblogs make this tool an instrument of great value for educational use within a constructivist model. Blogs support E-learning, establish an informal communication channel between teacher and student, promote social interaction, provide the student with a personal means to experience their own learning and, finally, they are easy to assimilate based on in some previous knowledge about digital technology. In this sense, it should not be forgotten that the students who now arrive at university belong to the Red Generation or Net Generation (Oblinger, 2005), which defines those born in the 1980s (1) and who have grown up with the Internet. ( 2). Their way of learning has to do with this generational nature and requires new educational approaches.

Edublogs

Just as there are warblogs, klogs, blongs and so many other words to distinguish weblogs according to the proposed use for which they are published, we find the term edublog, which comes from the union of education and blog. In this sense, we could understand edublogs as those weblogs whose main objective is to support a teaching-learning process in an educational context.
Both education and weblogs share a fundamental characteristic: both concepts can be defined as processes of knowledge construction. Recently, in this same magazine, the coordinator of this monograph referred to this use of blogs as "an interactive conversation during a journey through knowledge" (Sáez Vacas, 2005).

Edublogs in the blogosphere

Las primeras redes de profesores que experimentaron con los weblogs surgieron en la blogosfera anglosajona, como el portal británico Schoolblogs.com –que funciona desde 2001– y el grupo Education Bloggers Network ( 3), con sede en Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, uno de los mayores apoyos a la introducción de los blogs en un entorno académico fue liderado por la Universidad de Harvard ( 4), de la mano de Dave Winer, en la primavera de 2003. Un año después, la iniciativa del concurso internacional Edublog Awards 2004 ( 5) sirvió de igual forma para destacar los edublogs más interesantes. El aspecto educativo de los blogs ha suscitado también el interés de los investigadores, como demuestra el creciente número de artículos en revistas académicas y congresos que debaten este tema ( 6).

En el momento de escribir este artículo no contamos con una estimación fiable del número de edublogs que hay en Internet, así como tampoco la tenemos del número de blogs en general: véase al respecto Merelo y Tricas, 2005 y el apartado ‘Cuantificación’ en Fumero, 2005. Cada día, cada hora, puede haber un profesor que desde su aula, en cualquier parte del mundo, esté haciendo uso de esta herramienta. Y si, además de utilizarla personalmente, también anima a sus alumnos a convertirse en bloggers, entonces la cifra se estaría multiplicando en gran medida. Tan sólo contamos con los datos de comunidades como Schoolblogs.com –con unos 4.000 blogs– y de los canales de educación de algunos directorios, como Bitacoras.com, que actualmente registra más de 300 edublogs en español.
Some of the first experiences in Spain have come from the Communication and Journalism departments of higher education centers, such as the University of Navarra (Orihuela, 2004), the University of Malaga (Blanco, 2005) and the Carlos III University of Madrid ( Lara, 2004), in whose subjects students have been encouraged to create their own blogs. On the contrary, in the field of secondary education, its development has not been integrated into educational programs, but has been mainly due to the individual efforts of some teachers who have used blogs for communication with their students (7) .

Pedagogy with and on weblogs

Para un desarrollo efectivo de la Sociedad de la Información y del Conocimiento (SIC), la educación debe asumir el reto de la alfabetización digital de los ciudadanos para que puedan hacer un uso libre y responsable de los recursos en Internet. Según Trejo Delarbre (2005), el ciudadano requiere de destrezas específicas para su supervivencia en este nuevo entorno: «La capacitación, no sólo para encontrar información y saber discriminar entre ella, sino también para colocar contenidos en las redes informáticas, se ha convertido en requisito indispensable en la formación cultural, la competitividad laboral y las opciones sociales de las personas».

The Network should be used as a means and object of knowledge, in such a way that didactics adapted to the demand for continuous and distance training are developed in a new student-centered learning model (8). Teaching with and on blogs responds to this new social reality, since it can help manage the overabundance of information and extract meaning from it.

Until now, the development of edublogs has largely evolved as an imitation and / or replacement of the classic teacher's website that used this medium as a board of instructions and materials for its students. At the same time, the motivation from the classroom to start students as bloggers has also followed classic teaching models: the teacher is usually the one who suggests the subject of the content, the rate of updating, the number of posts (9), the tone and style, the type and number of links in the blogroll, etc., and also establishes these criteria as the evaluable elements for the final grade.

Cuando la introducción de una nueva tecnología reproduce modelos de enseñanza dominantes y simplemente se utiliza para “hacer lo mismo de siempre pero sobre nuevos soportes”, adquiere un inmerecido halo de modernidad que no aporta nada a su función didáctica. Los weblogs, así como cualquier nueva tecnología, no garantizan una mayor eficacia educativa por su mera utilización. El resultado dependerá del enfoque, de los objetivos y de la metodología con que sean integrados en cada programa educativo (10).

After these first years of experimentation, we are at a propitious moment for the educational application of weblogs to mature and evolve towards their integration within a constructivist pedagogy (O'Donnell, 2005; Dickey, 2004; Oravec, 2003a; Sade, 2005). Regardless of its content, we will understand the weblog as a format - with a specific container structure - and as a process within an ecosystem proper to the Network (Downes, 2004). The implications of both perspectives will have to be considered when you want to develop a comprehensive project for the application of weblogs in education.

Baumgartner (2004) considera que los weblogs «tienen un potencial intrínseco para revolucionar la estructura organizacional de los entornos tradicionales de enseñanza». La gran diferencia del formato blog, para este autor, es que permite controlar el nivel de apertura deseado, lo cual facilita su integración en las instituciones educativas frente a otros sistemas de gestión de contenido más abiertos – como los wikis – que pueden producir cierto rechazo o suspicacia. Además, los weblogs cuentan con la ventaja de su carácter exógeno con respecto al espacio educativo, ya que se construyen a través de los hiperenlaces en la Red y no dependen de un único servidor centralizado.

In most educational experiences with blogs, it is observed that the specific assignment of creating weblogs as an academic requirement and for a specific class does not always produce the expected motivation in the students. When the teacher limits the activity of the blog of his students to too structured criteria, they do not find enough space to experiment with the medium in a natural way. With this didactics, the blog ends up being a “forced writing”, where the student writes for the teacher and whose activity he leaves as soon as the school period ends (Downes, 2004; Drede, 2003; Remmell, 2004).
A proposal for a teaching model with weblogs within a constructivist pedagogy understands the blog as a personal and own means of the student, in such a way that it can be used in a transversal way throughout their academic life and not within a certain class. The role of the teacher in this model would be that of facilitator in this new space of freedom, accompanying the student on his own path of experimentation and learning through the blog (O'Donnell, 2005).

What is learned by editing weblogs

In addition to the classic uses that the teacher usually gives to this tool, such as updating content and communicating with his students, we will focus here on the abilities and skills that the student can develop in his experience as the author of a blog, taking advantage of all its possibilities as a publication format and instrument for social interaction on the Net.

Organization of the speech

The structure of weblogs allows the elaboration of thought in a sequential way and grants a high degree of control over the discourse. Virtually everything is modifiable in a blog without affecting its general layout: you can reedit a post, assign a new category, add new links to the blogroll and even change the design template whenever you want. This freedom to publish and republish does not revert to greater chaos in the retrieval of information, since the format itself generates a new permanent link or permalink for each new entry and also has different search systems for consultation: by words, topics, days or number of visits, for example.

The student blogger has all these options that enhance hypertextual language to compose his online publication and contextualize each new post within the speech of his blog. At this point, it is worth highlighting the importance of semantic tagging, as an evolution of the category classification typical of blogs. The incorporation of tags shared by communities such as Technorati, Flickr or Del.icio.us (11), demonstrates an effort of constant reflection in the student and makes him participate in a global, open and collaborative project where knowledge is built from the bottom up above.

One of the key elements of blogging is its posting system in reverse chronological order. This feature can be very useful for those teachers who want to provide a periodic update of new content and agree on a corresponding reading agreement with their students so that they can make use of this information. In contrast, for teaching processes, this method requires a fragmented follow-up in reverse order that may confuse students who are less familiar with the system. In these cases, the preparation of independent documents and their integration into the blog as didactic material through a hyperlink may be more effective.

Fostering the debate
Weblogs, as well as education, are by their very nature processes of communication, socialization and knowledge construction. One of its most important characteristics is the ability to interactivity, which allows the blog to go from being a monologue to a dialogue in a constant invitation to conversation (Efimova and De Moor, 2005; Wrede, 2003). In this way, the student can receive feedback from other participants in the debate and become more aware of their own learning (Ferdig and Trammell, 2004). In addition to observing the conversations that take place on his own blog through the comments he receives, or seeing references to his blog with trackbacks, the student can also follow the evolution of the debate on the blogs where he has left his comments, thanks to content aggregation services.

The possibility of interaction provided by weblogs is complementary to the function of discussion forums. The forums are still very valid to stimulate discussions between a working group. Blogs, however, are more useful in organizing the conversation if it is intended to provide new data and links (Wise, 2005).

Identity construction

La identidad va tomando forma en todos nuestros actos como autores de blogs y se refleja en aspectos como la elección del título del blog, la información personal que ofrece, los directorios en los que se inscribe, el diseño utilizado, los temas que suele tratar, los enlaces del blogroll, las fuentes más utilizadas, los comentarios que dejamos en otros blogs, etc. Todo ello va quedando trazado en la Red y construye una idea de quiénes somos y qué visión del mundo tenemos a los ojos de nuestros lectores (Oravec, 2003a). Serán ellos quienes valoren estos elementos definitorios con objeto de evaluar la credibilidad que les sugiere la coherencia e integridad de nuestro discurso (Chesher, 2005).

Herein lies another of the fundamental differences between forums and weblogs: their personal nature. In blogs an identity is constructed that responds to the author's manifestations in his activity over time: «The individual identity is created by the nature and quality of the interaction with the discourse –not by the judgments of another individual ( teacher, tutor) - […] Provides individuals with a sense of identity, responsibility and relevance ”(Wrede, 2005).

In parallel, the blogger himself can observe his degree of authority in the blogosphere through the reverse references (trackback) that his posts receive and from search engines such as Technorati. This reputation system has great similarity with the valuation that is made of citations and bibliographic references in academic publications.

Creation of learning communities

The creation of collective blogs allows the development of collaborative work capacities through the distribution of functions in the group and the establishment of a mutual mentoring model among its members. The teacher himself can also consider being one more author on the blog, at the same level as his students, who, in this way, will feel more recognized in the project and with a greater degree of autonomy (Dickinson, 2003).

Commitment to the audience

The teacher ceases to be the sole recipient of the student's production and becomes one more among all the potential readers of the Network. This public and interactive nature is essential to understand the socializing potential of weblogs. The student blogger will soon experience this dimension through various indicators of the response generated by their blog, already indicated above, such as comments, trackbacks, visits and the number of subscribers to their RSS feeds (12) ) in the aggregators.

Oravec (2003a) also talks about the existence of an “autobiographical pact” between the author and his readers that is manifested through a statement of principles, either express or tacit, about the work he develops on the blog. This acquired commitment may refer to issues such as how to choose your sources, the aspects you are going to cover and the part of personal information you want to give, among others.

In this relationship, it is convenient that the authors are also facilitators of the debate on their page and intervene in the comments of their own articles. This gives an image of closeness and debate between equals that breaks with the classical vertical transmitter-receiver of an author who writes and an audience that comments on what is written. This search for horizontality in relationships will be of vital importance for teacher bloggers who want to take advantage of the potential to communicate with their students through this medium.

Support for E-learning

Weblogs occupy an “intermediate space” between face-to-face teaching and structured E-learning systems (Oravec, 2003b). Both teachers and students benefit from the use of weblogs in distance learning processes. On the one hand, tutors have the format to organize materials, motivate learning communities and create links with students (Wise, 2005). For students, the development of their personal blog helps them build their own learning and establish networks of social interrelation that serve to alleviate the feelings of isolation that are generally associated with E-learning systems (Dickey, 2004).

The integration of weblogs in E-learning systems is one of the pillars of the European project i4Camp (13) (innovative, inclusive, interactive & intercultural learning campus), which envisages the construction of a “virtual campus” for collaborative learning in the field of higher education with the multicultural environment of the enlarged Europe in mind.

The i4Camp model promotes the application of constructivist pedagogy in an E-learning system. On the one hand, it is based on the development of the technological instruments necessary for this individualized construction to be possible and, on the other, on fostering collaboration in a new educational model where both students and teachers can act as tutors for the community of learning. The technological structure of i4Camp plans to have free software tools for online communication and collaboration - such as its own weblog service for teachers and students - as well as the availability of a digital fund of educational materials to support teaching.

Documentation

The weblog is an ideal means to coordinate research projects online, since it allows organizing the documentation of the process while benefiting from the possibility of receiving feedback (Mortensen and Walter, 2002). Through the activities of a weblog, such as searching, reading, selecting and interpreting a topic, students start a process in which they gradually become experts in a subject and may perhaps become source of information and reference for other similar blogs (Dickinson, 2003; Ferdig et al., 2004).

The modular nature of the weblog publishing systems allows the student to use the content syndication services to keep updated on the blogs of their interest. For his part, the teacher can also use this system to organize the reading of his students' blogs (Richardson, 2005).

Finally, it should be noted that weblogs favor other learning that, at times, remains hidden in the agenda of major educational objectives and is no less important. On the one hand, they represent an opportunity for socialization between teachers and students in a more horizontal and informal space than the classroom. On the other hand, students improve their writing techniques and concentrate their effort on narration, giving more importance to content than to form (Huffaker, 2004). The fact that it is public generates a sense of responsibility in the students, who put their own reputation on the Internet at stake and value their work above what could be an academic requirement directed exclusively at the teacher (Lankshear and Knobel, 2003) .

What to learn about the weblog format

Before launching students to become bloggers, it is advisable to guide them in the knowledge of the medium, in the analysis of blogs and in understanding their dynamics. To be able to approach this task, it is essential that the teacher has previous experience as a blogger, so that their orientations can be meaningful and also act as a reference for their students.

Here are some approximation strategies that may be useful in the experience with educational blogs:

Previous analysis of other blogs

Being a good reader of blogs helps to be a better blogger, since indirectly, guidelines and behaviors of the medium are assimilated. With this objective, it is recommended to train the student in the critical reading of other blogs of their interest and to use tools for their reading, such as searching the directories and subscribing to RSS feeds in the content aggregation services.

Responsibility in the Network

The student must be aware of the responsibilities that come from his activity as an author in an online publication. In this field, the teacher has a crucial role as a catalyst for a debate on the subject, so that the student can have a free and responsible experience on his blog (Oravec, 2002 and 2003a). In addition to the principles of blogospheric ethics developed by Rebecca Blood (2002), it would be necessary to know the Creative Commons licenses (14), understand the importance of linking to primary sources whenever possible, and learn guidelines for citing correctly.

With the spread of the Internet in recent years, teachers have become police officers trained to detect plagiarism in their students' jobs. The fact that they become bloggers puts them on the other side and makes them think about the importance of their recognition as intellectual authors in an open system. In this way, they will soon learn that online plagiarism is easier to detect than they may suppose, whether they are the ones who commit it or the victims. Features like trackback and search engines like Technorati will give you information on who quotes them and how they do it. Even in the case of omitting the link to the plagiarized source, the very dynamics of the Network means that sooner or later these faults are discovered and paid with disrepute, a fundamental value in building online reputation. The student must be aware that, citing the sources where we learn and are inspired, we are not only giving credence to our opinions, but we allow their access so that interested persons can contrast the information and contribute their observations.

Continuing with the awareness in this matter, it is important to also indicate that the weblog format allows a high degree of manipulation on the content –delete, modify, alter publication dates, delete and edit comments, for example–. As Blood (2002) warns, the great strength that blogs have as a personal and censorship-free format is, at the same time, their main weakness. This power must be managed responsibly and in accordance with an ethical commitment that guarantees an environment of trust and credibility in the blog. At this specific point, the author proposes to write each entry as if it could not be modified: "add, but do not rewrite or delete any post" (Blood, 2002). A suitable formula to correct any point can be the style of addendum, through a new post that corrects the previous one, with a hyperlink to it and a note reporting the update in the original post. In the case of deleting part of the content, it would be necessary to record those changes and why (15).

The blog as part of an ecosystem

Weblogs are part of the network ecosystem (O'Donnell, 2005; Oravec, 2003a). This implies that they are not taken as an isolated whole, nor as the only online tool that favors collaborative learning. It is convenient to place them in their context and to know the educational potential of other complementary systems, such as wikis and social bookmarking services.
As O'Donnell (2005) notes, "Too many people are wondering what blogging can do, before they really understand what blogging is." Blogs within an educational context can serve as an ideal platform for observation and analysis of the tool itself.

Future

The hypertextual format of blogs is evolving towards multimedia supports, largely due to the development of mobile telephony and its integration with digital audio, photography and video devices. This is where terms come from to name new ways of publishing audio and video content - podcast, audiocast and videocast - and to name new types of blogs: moblogs, videoblogs, audioblogs. In the field of education, this ability is very interesting for the elaboration and distribution of educational materials (Meng, 2005). In fact, there are already communities that use these supports, such as the Education Podcast Network (16), whose objective is to share audio materials with specific content for different educational levels, and the Art MOBS project (17),
The attractiveness of these new digital devices and the facility for online publication should also be an opportunity for citizens' training along the lines proposed by Gutiérrez Martín (2003), when he stands out as one of the priority objectives of digital literacy « provide an understanding of the nature of interactive multimedia document languages ​​and how they are integrated. "

Some conclusions
The use of weblogs in education requires the framework of a constructivist pedagogy that can take advantage of the characteristics of this tool, understood as a format and as a process.

This approach needs the support of educational institutions to promote research in new didactics that promote learning with and on weblogs as a way of approaching the needs of the society of the future.
This technology, which is still in the process of being established, not only requires an open and dynamic teaching framework, but also favors it. Blogs can help build this new methodology by offering its format and dynamics to experiment with new educational models.