Enhancing design thinking in instructional technology students

There is growing demand in our society to cultivate creativity and foster innovation. Design thinking has been successfully practiced as an educational framework for supporting innovation in educational and work contexts. However, research on design thinking education that facilitates the acquisition of knowledge related to design process and practices is extremely limited, particularly in educational contexts. This pre-/posttest mixed methods study examined blogging as an instructional approach for supporting design thinking education in an online instructional technology course. An analysis of quantitative and qualitative data revealed an improvement in students’ design thinking skills after participating in the course. Students were more comfortable using design practices and processes than their creative abilities. Blogging about design thinking opened the potential for active knowledge construction about design thinking and reflection about personal design practices. However, it also hindered participation of students who were less comfortable with narrative meaning-making afforded through blogging or sharing their ideas on open networks such as blogs.     

Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer interaction,learning motivation,and academic achievements

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi‐experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.     

Blog scrubbing: Exploring triggers that change privacy rules

An increasing number of individuals of all ages maintain important interpersonal relationships through blogs. Wide variation exists in how people disclose and manage their privacy on these blogs, particularly concerning the choices made about leaving information permanently visible on blogs or retrieving it sometime after an initial posting. This study applies Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory to explore the process of privacy rule adaptation for blogging by examining situations that have triggered bloggers to change their privacy rules to enact blog post deletion practices (“blog scrubbing”). Overall, open-ended responses from 356 bloggers were content analyzed. Chi-square analysis revealed differences in the frequency of triggers that changed the blogging post privacy rules and the proactive versus reactive nature of blogging privacy management deletion practices. Bloggers’ critical incidents that activate privacy rule changes demonstrate that impression management triggers, personal safety identity triggers, relational triggers, and legal/disciplinary triggers resulted in greater alteration of individual privacy rules used to protect these bloggers from the privileged online community of individuals granted access to an individual’s blog. Thus, bloggers essentially “scrubbed” their blog site and adapted their typical privacy rules with new ones that better protected them from the online community regarding that particular blogged information.     

Pattern of reflection in learning Authoring System through blogging

This research study aims to identify student's perceptions regarding the use of blogging, the pattern of reflection involved in learning Authoring System through blogging and student's performance in tests based on the reflection's pattern. Sixteen students who registered for the Authoring System subject participated in this study. It was conducted using quantitative approaches, through survey and pre-experimental design of one group post-test type. The instruments used were questionnaire, performance test and blog contents, where tutors and students posted messages and comments on the blog during the course. The results showed that the students' overall perception regarding the educational benefits of writing a blog and reading other students' blogs and comments was positive. Students also moderately agreed that they had difficulties in engaging in the reflection through blogging. It was also found that blogging indirectly improved the students' performance in the test. Through blog content analysis, the dominant type of reflection was monologue. However, the results from the data mining analysis showed that the students used reflective conversation and monologue type of reflection to achieve Grade A in learning Authoring System. It shows that students require deep and critical reflection to perform better in the subject.     

Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs

Accompanying the emergence of blog technology as a dominant online publishing paradigm is a growing interest in its educational benefits and applications. This study sets out to develop an empirically grounded framework for educational blogging in the context of teacher education. A working framework was first proposed that highlights four areas: self-expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue. An exploratory study was then conducted to examine the framework by involving two groups of student teachers during their teaching practice. This study revealed that the salient values of blogs centered on emotionally charged and social-oriented individual expressions as well as self-reflection. The interactive functionality of blogs was used mostly for exchanging social support rather than reflective dialogue. A new dimension – blog-reading – has emerged through the investigation and been added to the original framework. The findings can contribute to a better understanding of the educational values of blogs and their meaningful applications as educational media.     

Using blogging to enhance the initiation of students into academic research

For the net-generation students learning in a Web 2.0 world, research is often equated with Googling and approached with a mindset accustomed to cut-and-paste practices. Recognizing educators’ concern over such students’ learning dispositions on the one hand, and the educational affordances of blogging on the other, this study examines the use of blogging to initiate students into academic research at the tertiary level. It focuses on the experiences of three students from a third-year music class working on their research paper with blog-based supervision provided by the teacher. The course, in a hybrid fashion, combined face-to-face lectures and tutorials with blog sharing and discussion. The students’ individually-owned blogs were specifically used as their research diaries in which they logged in their work in progress, they then received input from both the teacher and fellow students. Based on the researcher’s self-evaluation of the teaching-supervising process, an analysis of the students’ blog discourse, and students’ survey feedback, this article offers useful insights and suggestions for educators interested in either using or researching on blogging as a means to develop students’ research skills and understanding.     

Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework

This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, "communities of blogging practices" emerge-that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basis for systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.     

Using blogs to support learning during internship

Blogging has been recommended as a suitable tool for learning during internship due to its associated usefulness in collaborative learning, reflection, communication, and social support. In this study, blogging was incorporated into the internship activities of two discipline-specific groups of interns: information management (n = 53) and nursing (n = 28). In examining the behavior, perceptions and processes of blogging among interns from the two disciplines, a mixed-methods design was used to obtain quantitative and qualitative data through structured interviews and blogging entries. Results revealed that the interns engaged regularly in the writing and reading of their own blogs, and commented on others’ blog-writing. The interns perceived blogs to be useful during internship in providing an avenue for knowledge construction, problem solving, reflection, and communicating their emotions. Positive perceptions were not influenced by discipline background, frequency of use, or blogging platform. Qualitative analyses of blog contents indicated that the students engaged in cognitive, metacognitive-reflective, affective, and social-collaborative learning processes in blogging. Higher engagement was found in cognitive and metacognitive processes. Responses to open-ended probes suggest that pedagogical factors (e.g., grading system, supervision) may also have influenced students’ blogging behaviors and perceptions. Overall, this study offers evidence to support the use of blogging during internship as computer-based support for learning.     

Towards an analysis framework for investigating students' engagement and learning in educational blogs

Educational blogs are currently gaining in popularity in schools and higher education institutions, and they are widely promoted as collaborative tools supporting students' active learning. However, literature review on educational blogging revealed a lack of a complete and consistent framework for studying and assessing students' engagement and the impact of blogging on students' learning. This study reports on the application of an analysis framework for evaluating blogging learning activities, based on two well‐documented models, those of Community of Inquiry (CoI) and Social Network Analysis. The framework proposed is examined through an empirical study involving 21 K‐9 students, coming from two classes, in Greece. This investigation shed light into the different ways of students' engagement in a blog‐based project, namely their social and cognitive presence that supported the development of a CoI and learning. The results suggest that the students, through their different roles in the blog, achieved higher thinking and cognitive levels.     

Multimedia blogging in physical education: Effects on student knowledge and ICT self-efficacy

The main idea behind this study was to explore the educational potential of multimedia blogging for academic disciplines such as Physical Education (PE) that are not heavily based on written discourse and where multiple representations are important in learning. A class blog was utilized as a means for PE students to reflect on and showcase their performances of four specific basketball skills, through creating multimedia posts on these skills and receiving comments from their instructors, peers and an external expert. The effectiveness of multimedia blogging was evaluated, in terms of the acquisition of knowledge of the specific basketball skills and the self-efficacy in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), as compared to that of an equivalent multimedia website which lacked the blogging component. Students’ responses to the blogging activity were also investigated. The sample were 70 undergraduate PE students who were assigned to two groups, one of which used the class blog (Group A, N = 35) and the other one the website (Group B, N = 35), both for 11 weeks. The study followed a pretest/posttest experimental design, taking before and after measurements of each group through written questionnaires. Participation in the blogging activity did have a positive impact on students’ ICT self-efficacy, given that Group A students exhibited significant gains in Internet self-efficacy as well as in multimedia processing and blogging self-efficacy, whereas those of Group B did not. Students’ responses to the blogging activity were also positive. However, within both groups no significant increase was found in students’ knowledge of the basketball skills. The implications of the findings for higher education and future research are discussed.     

Why do people post and read personal messages in public? The motivation of using personal blogs and its effects on users’ loneliness,belonging, and well-being

The purpose of the current paper is to develop a theoretical model that identifies why people blog personal content and explains the effects of blogging in “real life.” Data from an online survey are analyzed using maximum likelihood procedures in LISREL 8.75 to test the structural model. Among 531 respondents from Cyworld, a popular social network and blogging site in South Korea, a randomly selected group of 251 users was used to develop the model. The other group of 280 users was used to confirm the usefulness of the revised model. Results (N = 251; N = 280) showed that impression management and voyeuristic surveillance are two major psychological factors that motivate individuals to post and read messages on personal blogs. Results also showed evidence for blogging’s real life consequences, measured by users’ perceived social support, loneliness, belonging, and subjective well-being.     

Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising

Web advertising (online advertising), a form of advertising that uses the World Wide Web to attract customers, has become one of the most commonly-used marketing channels. This paper addresses the concept of Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising, which refers to the assignment of personal ads to any blog page, chosen in according to bloggers’ interests. As blogs become a platform for expressing personal opinions, they naturally contain various kinds of statements, including facts, comments and statements about personal interests, of both a positive and negative nature. To extend the concept behind the Long Tail theory in contextual advertising, we argue that web bloggers, as the constant visitors of their own blog-sites, could be potential consumers who will respond to ads on their own blogs. Hence, in this paper, we propose using text mining techniques to discover bloggers’ immediate personal interests in order to improve online contextual advertising. The proposed Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising (BCCA) framework aims to combine contextual advertising matching with text mining in order to select ads that are related to personal interests as revealed in a blog and rank them according to their relevance. We validate our approach experimentally using a set of data that includes both real ads and actual blog pages. The results indicate that our proposed method could effectively identify those ads that are positively-correlated with a blogger’s personal interests.     

The phenomenon of blogs and theoretical model of blog use in educational contexts

Many educators have attempted to implement a blog in educational contexts to enhance the communication environment among students and teachers. However, it is uncertain as to why traditional computer-mediated communication (CMC) applications should be replaced with blogs. It is time to comprehensively explore the effects of educational blogs by considering the CMC tools. This paper reviews prior studies and develops a model for the use of blogs in educational contexts by taking into account socio-technical systems theory. The model contributes to interactivity, an open system, a visualization tool, and a decentralized environment of online communication circumstance.     

Design and implementation of Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly system (BRAINS)

A blog (shortened from ‘weblog’) is a trendy way to share personal journal with others in the cyber world. Traditionally rendering and accessing blogs are normally conducted at a stationary PC. However, such a scheme hinders blog users from writing and reading blogs timely. A short-lived idea came out and passed away suddenly. To facilitate the instant blog updating and retrieving, we combined cellular messaging (SMS/MMS messaging and MMS/WAP push) and open-source software (Blosxom and Apache) to develop a novel system for the Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly (BRAINS). BRAINS enables blog users to note down their whims and share interests anytime and anywhere. Blog journalists can utilize their mobile phones in hand to compose and deliver blogs to BRAINS by SMS and MMS messaging at their pleasure. Through pre-registering on BRAINS, readers also can get the up-to-date blogs content or the incoming blog notification immediately by MMS push or WAP push. With pervasive networks like the GPRS, 3G, public WLAN (PWLAN) and fixed DSL networks, BRAINS makes mobile blog rendering and accessing more evident.     

Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to develop a better understanding of readers?? interactions with blogs and bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity from both readers?? and bloggers?? perspectives. Readers?? significance and contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including: community membership and participation; the relationship between political ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses, this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage. Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media.     

Birds of a feather: How personality influences blog writing and reading

The rapid development of blogs as a social networking tool has greatly increased the number of people who are expressing themselves in text published online. As yet little is known about the social psychology of online interaction using recently developed Web 2.0 functionalities. To what extent do principles of social psychology carry over into the online domain and how can appropriate use of those principles assist in activities such as community building, e-commerce, marketing, and personalization of services? There would seem to be a large number of novel research questions that can be posed with respect to online interaction. One pertinent question concerns the extent to which compatibility of personality influences online interaction. We investigated this question in terms of hypotheses derived from the personality research literature, using a two-part experiment. In the first study, eight participants wrote blogs in two distinct genres (personal diaries and commentaries) and rated their own personalities. In the second study 12 different participants judged the personality of authors as implied in the blog texts created in the first study. Those participants also completed a personality questionnaire and rated their attraction to the blog text author. Readers of the blog corpus were able to consistently judge the personality of the writers based solely on the text that they wrote. Moreover, they followed a well-established social rule regarding interpersonal attraction in real-life interaction. Blog readers were significantly more attracted to blog writers with more similar personalities—offering support that in a blog environment, “birds of a feather flock together.” Emotion word use in the blog corpus correlated with writer’s personality, suggesting that online personality may be signalled by linguistic cues. The two most popular genres of blog writing, personal journal and commentary, differed in how accurately readers judged author personality traits. Based on the results obtained it is suggested that personality is an important determinant and that further research on how people communicate with blogs will be relevant to social network analysis and to marketing.     

Acceptance of blog usage: The roles of technology acceptance,social influence and knowledge sharing motivation

Recently, there has been a dramatic proliferation in the number of blogs; however, little is published about what motivates people to participate in blog activities. Based on the theory of reasoned action, we developed a model involving technology acceptance, knowledge sharing and social influences. A survey of 212 blog participants found strong support for the model. The results indicated that ease of use and enjoyment, and knowledge sharing (altruism and reputation) were positively related to attitude toward blogging, and accounted for 78% of the variance. On the other hand, social factors (community identification) and attitude toward blogging significantly influenced a blog participant's intention to continue to use blogs. Together they explain 83% of the variance of intention to blog.     

Communication Communities or “CyberGhettos?”: A Path Analysis Model Examining Factors that Explain Selective Exposure to Blogs1

This study used an online panel of Internet users to examine the degree to which blog users practice selective exposure when seeking political information. The research employed a path analysis model to explore the extent to which exposure to offline and online discussion of political issues, and offline and online media use, as well as political variables and demographic factors, predict an individual's likelihood to engage in selective exposure to blogs. The findings indicate that respondents did practice selective exposure to blogs, predominantly those who are heavy blog users, politically active both online and offline, partisan, and highly educated.     

Blogging: self presentation and privacy

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children's daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers' subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the 'private' to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so.     

Gender Differences in British Blogging

This article asks whether blogging in the United Kingdom, which started later than in the United States, reproduces the gender differences in blogging behavior and the gender inequalities in recognition that have been observed in studies based largely on U.S. bloggers. A sample of 48 female and male British bloggers answered a questionnaire about their blogging practices and attitudes; data were also collected from their blogs and by means of online tools. For both sexes, blogging is mainly a leisure activity, and men and women find the same range of satisfactions in blogging. However, more women use blogging as an outlet for creative work, whether as a hobby or as a livelihood. The results support several reasons advanced in previous research for the lower public profile of women bloggers.