Blogging pragmatics and pedagogy: An adventurein faculty development

Crystal M. Ramsay & Destiny D. Aman &

Barton K. Pursel

Published online: 16 November 2012# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract As university faculty are increasingly called upon to ‘do more with less,’particularly to teach more students with fewer resources, technology can provide viablesolutions to pedagogical dilemmas. Faculty developers are frequently tasked withintroducing faculty to or coaching them in the use of technological solutions. Withrespect to blogs, the typical show-and-tell approach to technology awareness that ourfaculty development center uses seemed inadequate, given the complexity of blogdesign, implementation, and maintenance. Instead, we found the best way to instructuniversity faculty in the use of blogs is to give them an opportunity to participate in ablogging community as part of a Course in College Teaching (CCT). We experimentedwith two different approaches in two different sections of our CCT. This paper reports onthe current blogging culture in higher education, describes our specific context forutilizing blogs, shares implementation decisions and learning affordances, and forwardsa set of ‘lessons learned.’

Keywords Blogs .Weblogs . Faculty development . Online pedagogy . Educationaltechnology

1 Introduction

In an era of shrinking university budgets and growing class enrollments, faculty areincreasingly being asked to incorporate online components into their courses as a wayto stimulate student engagement, to better connect with today’s “millennial” gener-ation, and to make larger classes feel smaller. However, the increased expectation forfaculty to keep abreast of current teaching and learning technologies is coupled withother demands on faculty time, including growing research and service commitments.As a result, many faculty find it difficult to set aside time to explore the ever-changing

Educ Inf Technol (2014) 19:425–440DOI 10.1007/s10639-012-9221-0

C. M. Ramsay (*) :D. D. Aman : B. K. PurselSchreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, The Pennsylvania State University, 301 Rider Building,University Park, PA 16827, USAe-mail: cmg5@psu.edu

array of new technologies, determine which to implement, and consider how to do soin ways that make good practical and pedagogical sense. In response, faculty devel-opers have long made teaching with technology a priority in their interventions withfaculty, typically demonstrating various technologies during workshops or duringone-on-one consultations. Because of the complexity of their design and manage-ment, however, course blogs are more difficult to introduce and explore in thesetraditional faculty development formats. In our work as instructional consultants atour university’s faculty development center, we have found that although someinstructors are monitoring blogs and consuming content online, few have createdtheir own blog material, and most are unfamiliar with the ways that a blog can be usedto support various course objectives. These gaps in experience can present a dauntingbarrier to adoption of this technology in the classroom. As a result, course blogs arelargely left only within the purview of “early adopters.”

To address this issue, during the Spring semester of 2011 we incorporated a courseblog into two concurrent sections of our center’s 8-week Course in College Teaching(CCT), facilitated at two different campuses of our institution. As it was not customaryto facilitate simultaneous course sections in different locations, we decided early in ourplanning to incorporate a course blog to better serve both our needs as instructors, andthe needs of the course participants. When determining how to best implement the blog,we wrestled with challenges and questions–the same challenges and questions thatfaculty members may encounter under similar circumstances. We were asked to expanda current course offering and used a course blog as a way to, in a sense, do more withless. This is also a common entry point to teaching with technology for many faculty.Although our context is faculty development, we believe that the implementationdecisions we faced and the lessons we learned about motivation, monitoring, andmaintenance are generalizeable to many contexts. In this paper, we report on the currentblogging culture in higher education, describe our specific context for utilizing a blog,share implementation decisions that we grappled with and what our decisions meant forour course participants and their learning, and forward a set of ‘lessons learned.’

2 Blogging in higher education

For nearly a decade, educators and scholars have explored, researched, and implementedblogs in academic settings in a wide variety of ways. From a pedagogy standpoint,common uses of blogs include serving as a space for students to reflect (Downes 2004;Rowe 2012), to exchange ideas through authoring entries (Betts and Glogoff 2004;Maag 2005), to share feedback via commenting (Glogoff 2005; Windham 2007), andto interact with personnel beyond the confines of a course (Oravec 2003; Lei et al.2012). In addition to serving as an avenue for instructor feedback, blogs are capableof fostering student-to-student feedback, offering a feedback loop that is immediateand democratic (Ion and Stingu 2012). This type of student-to-student interaction canalso act as a formative assessment strategy, assisting students in filling knowledge gaps(Cano et al. 2012). Many blog uses, initially proposed several years ago, are nowbeing implemented in higher education classrooms. New implementations are alsoemerging, such as note-taking and personal content management, that focus more onusing blog software as a simple web-publishing platform (Kerawalla et al. 2009).

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Some advanced implementations attempt to leverage the blog platform as a diagnostictool, providing a place for instructors to analyze a student’s understanding of content andthen create a personalized learning roadmap for each student (Rowe 2012).

Blog software is leveraged in a wide variety of ways to impact a student’s educationalexperience, yet little is known about faculty development efforts to help college teachersalign blog usage and pedagogy. Several implementation and pilot study reports can befound online (e.g., Higgins et al. 2004) that discuss both the technical implementationrequirements of a blog platform, along with faculty training requirements to make thesoftware work, but these do not address pedagogy. Some discipline-specific articlesdiscuss blogging activities to support faculty development efforts, but they do notaddress how faculty transition from using a blog for professional development toleveraging a blog in the classroom. As with much technology, end users must see apractical value for the tool and not merely incorporate technology just for the sake ofusing it (Hardy, Tinney et al. 2012). Our challenge as faculty developers was to assistinstructors in recognizing the common and practical pedagogical challenges thatcould be solved by using a blog as a classroom tool.

For our part, the approach we took to blogs in the CCT was similar to that used byfaculty developers in medical fields (Cousins and Perris 2009), but also borrowed frombehavior theory. For instance, past articles have illustrated success in faculty devel-opment for nurses, where a blog was used as a method for facilitating communication inthe form of online study groups (Shaffer et al. 2006). Participants discussed pedagog-ical articles and approaches to nursing education, all facilitated by an establishednursing faculty member. The CCT blog was similar in that each cohort was viewed asa large study group, and the facilitators encouraged discussion on various topicsrelated to pedagogy. In addition to using the blog as a discussion and collaborationtool, the participants also experienced what it would be like to use a blog in their ownclasses. In this way, the CCT blog was a model for blog implementation moregenerally. Following the work of Hsu and Lin (2008) examining blogging behaviorand acceptance, the facilitators of the CCT attempted to model the behavior expectedof participants. This took the form of authoring blog posts, and encouraging com-ments by course participants. Facilitators also spent significant time responding tocomments. By the end of the CCT, several participants were authoring their ownposts and interacting with one another without as much input from the facilitators.This method of modeling behavior is an example that participants can take back totheir own courses and leverage in order to build a collaborative blog community.

3 Our context

At our large mid-Atlantic institution, as on other university campuses, part of our workas faculty developers is to design and facilitate workshops on teaching and learning forfaculty and graduate student instructors. In this particular semester, we were tasked withsimultaneously facilitating two sections of our center’s popular Course in CollegeTeaching. The 8-week noncredit course covers major topics and issues related to learning,instruction, and assessment in higher education. The CCT is typically conducted in atraditional face-to-face format with 2-hour class meetings held once a week. In thissemester, one course section (CCT-1), was held at our main campus and was conducted

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in this traditional format. The second section (CCT-2), was held at one of the university’ssmaller campuses, and was conducted in a blended format such that five sessions wereadministered online and three were administered face-to-face.

In addition to their format and location, the two sections also differed in theirparticipant profiles. The CCT is designed for course instructors, and while theproportion of faculty and graduate students tends to vary by semester, the classtypically includes a mix of both groups and a variety of experience levels. In Spring2011, however, CCT-1 was comprised almost entirely of doctoral students and post-doctoral scholars, whereas the participants in CCT-2 were all faculty members (bothnew and veteran). CCT-1 was also a larger group comprised of 23 participants, whilethe CCT-2 enrolled 13 participants. In the larger face-to-face group, we made blogparticipation voluntary; in the blended course, it was required. Table 1 summarizesthe differences between the CCT sections.

Despite the differences between the two sections, the goals for both were the same.Similarly, the objectives for blog use were also the same in both sections, althoughour expectations for how those objectives would be accomplished were necessarilydifferent between the two.

Participant learning objectives specific to the blog were to:

1. Participate in online discussions about teaching and learning2. Consider the pedagogical implications of utilizing a blog space3. Practice blogging skills in a safe and supportive environment

The first objective was largely a pragmatic one. The CCT generates a lot ofdiscussion; so we needed a discussion forum. For the face-to-face sessions in CCT-1we leveraged a blog environment to follow up class discussions that ended prematurelyor that needed additional time for reflection. We also desired a venue for discussingcourse material and new issues of concern to our participants that arose once our classwas dismissed. For the online sessions of the blended course (CCT-2), we used the blogas a web-based discussion forum in lieu of face-to-face conversations and to discussspecific topics outlined in the online session guides. Finally, for both groups we needed amechanism for conveniently linking conversations to the readings and images that wereoften the stimuli for discussions. The blog enabled participants to locate materials, linkto them, read, and discuss—all from one centralized location. Additionally, unlike ouruniversity’s course management system, the blog is publicly available on the web, soparticipants could easily share course materials and continue discussions with others (forinstance, on Facebook), and refer back to them later for reference. Many of the benefitsof blog use above were based on Kim’s (2008) comparison of blogs to traditional

Table 1 Profiles of CCT sections

Section Format Participantsa Duration (weeks) Blog required

CCT-1 Face-to-face 23 8 No

CCT-2 Blended 13 8 Yes

a Participants in CCT-1 were primarily doctoral scholars with teaching responsibilities;

CCT-2 consisted of university faculty

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course management systems for collaborative activities, emphasizing the opennessand centralized characteristics of a blog.

Objectives two and three operated at a meta-level in our CCTs. That is, we wantedto meaningfully engage our faculty and graduate participants in conversations aboutthe pedagogical implications of utilizing blogs in academic courses. We saw no moreauthentic way to do that than to have them engage with one another via a course blog.In other words, we wanted course participants to blog about the implications ofblogging in a course. Finally, we hoped that, ultimately, some of the participantswould decide that a blog would add value to their own course(s). Exposing instructorsto the blogging environment and creating a space where they could practice, wehoped, would build efficacy around blog use in a safe and supporting environment.

4 Implementation decisions

Our university maintains a blogs platform and a series of templates that simplified ourinitial blog design. However, making important decisions around implementation for ourtwo CCTs was less straightforward. In this section, we discuss the various questions weconsidered when setting up the course blogs. These questions are not specific to our CCTclasses, but rather to blog use in general. In fact, any instructor considering a course blogwould be confronted with most of these questions. However, since the CCT participantswere themselves course instructors, we made sure to bring these choices to their attentionso they could be aware of the impact of our decisions on their experience as blog usersand course participants. In this way, we enabled course participants to reflect on and learnfrom our experience as instructors. Participants seemed to appreciate this transparency. Infuture CCTs, we may consider having them answer some of these questions collectivelywhile discussing the potential benefits and drawbacks of the choices.

4.1 Course requirement?

Even in a course like the CCTwhere faculty members are the students, some things arerequired. Thus, we had to decide if the blog would be a required activity in our CCT.Requiring participation would ensure a certain amount of activity on the blog, but itwould add an additional assessed component to an already full agenda for courseparticipants. If we decided to require blog participation, we would subsequently needto decide what exactly to expect (stand-alone posts or comments), and how to assess therequirement. Ultimately, as noted, we did not require the blog in our face-to-face course.This course in the face-to-face format is a long-standing event that is popular in its currentincarnation. In addition, the CCT instructors were relatively new to faculty developmentand had not taught with blogs even in our own academic disciplines, so we were reluctantto require the blog without having sufficient practice. Once it was determined that wewould administer a second concurrent CCT in a blended course format, we decided torequire the blog for the blended version. It was easier to justify experimenting withrequired blog participation in a partly-online course where participants were not com-mitting to as much face-to-face time. Also, since blog discussion would be substitutingfor much of the in-person discussion in CCT-2, we felt that the additional time require-ment for participants to post and comment on the blog was justified.

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4.2 Public availability?

When setting up the blog, the administrator is prompted to indicate whether blogprotection is preferred. That is, will the blog be visible to the larger public or only toapproved users? Will outsiders be able to comment on the blog, or will comments belimited to course participants? Will participants be allowed to post anonymous com-ments, or will they be required to identify themselves? These are important questions.One must consider potential ‘harm done’ if outsiders view the discussions, join in, orcomment. In contrast, what is the value added by opening the conversation to a largercommunity? Another consideration is protection of the anonymity of the blog users.Sometimes in our CCT we enroll people who want to keep their participationconfidential. Our blog platform does not currently allow for anonymous posting, sorequiring participation on a public blog may effectively result in “outing” CCTparticipants. Protecting the blog from outside access allows all course participantsto engage in online conversations without threat of discovery that they are taking acourse to improve their teaching. One of our graduate student participants indicatedthat his lack of participation on the blog was due to his concern about beingdiscovered by a faculty mentor who did not value teaching. We wonder now whetherassigning a pseudonym would have been an appropriate strategy for encouragingparticipation while respecting the need for anonymity.

Ultimately, in this initial blog experiment, we left the blogs unprotected. A publicblog is readily shared with others, thus broadening the influence and potential impactof the participants’ posts. We determined that great benefit could result if interestedbloggers outside the course weighed in on our discussions, either on the blog itself orin follow-up conversations outside the course.

4.3 Participant access/roles?

All bloggers in our course were given blog permission as commenters, authors, andcontributors. There are, of course, other roles including blog administrator, designer,and editor. Considering ours was, for the most part, a novice group of bloggers, wegranted permission to engage only in ways that matched our objectives. We assignedroles that allowed our course participants to create and comment on their own entriesand on the entries of others. The roles of participants were clearly different from therole of the course and blog facilitators. Ours was the task of frontloading the blogwith information, uploading most of the materials that would become fodder fordiscussion, and modeling blog behavior.

4.4 Separate blogs or combined?

Another consideration for us was whether to administer separate blogs for each CCTsection or, given that both were essentially the same course with the same learninggoals and objectives, to engage everyone in one combined blog. The advantage ofseparate blogs was that, as each group of participants coalesced as a unique commu-nity of learners, they could continue their familiar conversations online. It was, weimagined, a comfort factor that likely would bolster participation. In contrast, main-taining only one blog for both groups had obvious benefits for us as instructors (i.e.,

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time, development, modeling, maintenance). As well, we imagined benefit fromuniting two different groups of participants in combined conversations about coursetopics. We could, in essence, extend the community. We decided to maintain separateblogs for each section, in the hope of building cohesion within the groups. Weconsidered encouraging the groups to comment on one another’s posts across blogs,but decided against it. Much of the course material was the same, but the conversationthreads were unique to each CCT section. Another model would be to maintain acontinuous blog from one CCT to the next over time, archiving older posts andmaking new ones available to enrich discussion.

4.5 Comment structure or entry structure?

We considered two issues relative to bloggers’ comments and entries. One weanticipated; one we did not. The one we anticipated was related to blog post structure.Before the CCT began, we wondered whether there should be a particular structure tothe blog comments and entries. Would participant comments be relevant, on topic,and useful without a prompt or imposed structure? As noted, participation wasvoluntary in one group, and for the other our intent was to keep stakes relativelylow in order to maximize participation. We decided to require no particular structurebut instead to invite freeform comments and entries.

The second, unanticipated, issue was tied to the first. Although we invited free-form comments and entries, these were still guided by specific instructions deliveredvia session plans for the blended course and on-site directions for participants in theface-to-face course. For example, after reading two articles about new technologiesthat represented opposing views, course participants were instructed to ‘comment onthe blog’ about their own perspective relative to the issues raised in the readings. Wefound ourselves with the unanticipated dilemma of where to direct participants topost. For the first round of entries, a blogger or two posted a separate entry as a wayto respond. A few others commented on those entries. But there was not a clearunderstanding of where to comment.

We resolved this issue by creating our own initial entry that briefly describedreadings or outlined an issue. We then instructed participants to comment on ourprompt (See Fig. 1).

This strategy, for example, eliminated separate entries and funneled all partici-pants’ comments into one comment stream that could easily be tracked. In someinstances, one facilitator posted an entry, and the co-facilitator was the first tocomment. This continued our strategy of modeling behavior, demonstrating for

Fig. 1 Screenshot of a blog post prompt

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participants what was expected in terms of the structure and content of blog com-ments. Sometimes in the entry title we even used the phrase ‘Comment here.’

5 Differences in cohort blog participation

Examining activity data for the two different cohorts illustrated a large gap inparticipation. For the purpose of this analysis, participation is defined as contributingblog entries and comments. Table 2 presents the overall number of entries andcomments by both facilitators and participants for CCT-1 and CCT-2.

The major differences revealed by the data relate to the amount of participation byparticipants in proportion to the amount of participation by facilitators. In CCT-2,facilitators appeared to spend less time on the blog, but participation was consistent,averaging nearly one blog interaction per week. Alternatively, facilitators of the CCT-1 section spent more time on the blog, contributing nearly double the amount ofinteractions (mostly in the form of comments) compared to the CCT-2 section. Withmore facilitator time on the CCT-1 blog, the participants appeared to interact less.Because the two different CCT sections had different blogging policies (required vs.not required), the data are presented by CCT section in Figs. 2 and 3.

Some interesting patterns also emerged with respect to when students andfacilitators interacted on the blog throughout the course. Facilitators in CCT-1interacted on the blog regularly through week six, and then facilitator activitydropped. (See Fig. 4.) For their part, participants in the CCT-1 section consistentlyengaged on the blog via comments, with participation peaking early in the course andagain in Week 5. Entries started in Week 2, and participants continued to postentries nearly every week, even extending beyond the end of the course. Asstudents get accustomed to using the blog and communicating using comments,the data suggests they might be more inclined to post entries as their comfortlevel with the blog grows. An interesting unintended use of the blog occurredin CCT-1 where some participants continued to use the blog after the courseofficially ended. This was in the form of student entries posted after Week 7,leading to several comments. This might be considered an advantage of theblog platform over other communication platforms, such as course managementsystems, which often ‘close’ course sections after they end, prohibiting furthercommunication. The blog might be a tool worth exploring to build cohorts thatcan continue on after specific faculty development events occur, keeping thelines of communication open.

The CCT-2 data show a somewhat different pattern. Facilitators took an active roleearly in the course, starting off by posting a series of entries; then facilitator

Table 2 Overall blog activity forboth CCT-1 and CCT-2

Facilitator-authoredentries

Facilitatorcomments

Participant-authoredentries

Participantcomments

Total

CCT-1 23 32 13 41 109

CCT-2 22 13 12 69 116

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participation plateaued at roughly five interactions per week beginning in Week 2.This is in contrast to CCT-1, where facilitator activity began somewhat low, thenpeaked in Week 5.

Participants, on the other hand, posted many entries and comments during the first2 weeks of the course, then activity significantly declined. It is worth pointing out thatSpring Break occurred between Weeks 3 and 4, which may account for the decline inactivity by this cohort of graduate student participants. Data then show an increase inparticipant commenting for the final 2 weeks of the course (Fig. 5).

Our attribution for the different patterns noted above lies in the required versusnon-required nature of the blog. Recall, for example, that CCT-2 was a blendedcourse comprised of university faculty members. The required blog communicationwas described and guided by weekly session plans designed for the online portion ofthe course. The required weekly blog activity would explain the consistency inparticipant response rates for that group. To the extent that participants visited the

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Fig. 2 A comparison offacilitator and participant blogactivity in CCT-1

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Fig. 3 A comparison of facilita-tor and participant blog activityin CCT-2

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blog and responded to specific posts or questions, they were complying with thecourse requirements. Thus, it is possible that explanations and guidance provided viathe detailed weekly session plans in CCT-2 functioned as a proxy for intenseparticipation and modeling on the part of the facilitators in CCT-1. Blog activitywas not required of the graduate students in the face-to-face CCT-1. Instead, therewas only facilitator coaching and modeling to provide instruction and guidance, not asupplemental session plan as well.

6 Learning affordances

In the implementation of a course blog, student participation is an important goal. Ofcourse, participation alone is not a proxy for learning. In academic courses, learningcan and should be measured in a variety of ways. In the CCTs, we measured learningusing a range of assessment tools, but not in ways directly linked to the blog; instead,

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Fig. 4 CCT-1 participants’ blogactivity, comparing entries andcomments

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Fig. 5 CCT-2 participants’ blogactivity, comparing entries andcomments

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as discussed above, blog participation was the focus of our efforts. Our objective wasto encourage use and experimentation, not for participants to become proficient overa short course.

Still, there were unique affordances and learning benefits to our participants.Stories of four of our participants exemplify the value added by a course blog.James1 and Bonnie used the blog space to share resources with fellow participants.Following a session on feedback and assessment strategies, James shared severalarticles about funding agencies requiring evaluation of projects they sponsor. Thus,the link between the class session and James’ post was clear and immediate. Simi-larly, after a class session on developing e-portfolios, Bonnie posted a resource thatshe had found and thought would be beneficial to the group. It was, however, notmerely an exercise in sharing. Her post explicitly stated, “Here’s my attempt atuploading a link to the blog to a PowerPoint presentation.” So while Bonnie practicednew skills within the blog space, others benefited from the content of her practicepost. James and Bonnie’s blog activity demonstrates that participants used the blogspace to practice important skills, and the entire group was the beneficiary ofadditional pertinent resources.

On more than one occasion, one participant, Richard, used the blog space to sharenew insights and to extend class discussions. In unprompted voluntary posts, Richardreflected on topics such as his personal exam-writing insecurities and his thoughts oncourse grading policies. Through these posts he solicited feedback and advice fromfellow participants. Richard’s behavior demonstrates that the blog space can serve asa forum for discussion beyond the classroom time and space.

A post by one of our participants exemplifies one more way that a course blogadds value and learning opportunities. It is the example of Asmita, who, following aclass discussion of Voice Thread, wanted to try it out in the class she was currentlyteaching. She put together a Voice Thread for her class then shared it in a blog postwith the CCT group. Not only did this post generate comments from the coursefacilitators and fellow students, it also prompted a comment from a Voice Threadtechnology support person whom she had contacted to help her troubleshoot the toolitself. The benefits: Asmita tried something new that she had just learned about in theCCT. When she got the tool to work for her own class, she learned how to upload it tothe course blog. Other participants in the class could witness the results of herexperiment with the tool. In the face-to-face class that followed, Asmita was ableto elaborate on what it was like to use Voice Thread in her class as well as what it waslike to share it on the blog. Asmita’s experience demonstrates the value of a courseblog as a feedback loop.

7 Lessons learned

Our concurrent CCT courses ran for 8 weeks. In that time, we learned importantlessons that have already translated into improved blogging experiences for others inour center who are now incorporating similar course blogs. Some lessons we learnedas blog administrators. Some lessons we learned as we weighed the pedagogical

1 Names are pseudonyms.

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impact of our implementation decisions. And still others we learned from our facultyand graduate student bloggers.

7.1 Prompt participants to comment

For our purposes in the CCT, we wanted bloggers to respond to questions, shareperspectives, and offer examples from their teaching experiences. In short, we desiredfocused blogging; so we prompted comments and also modeled behavior. Thisallowed us to direct comments toward focused topics and to maintain a conversationthread in one place. The latter not only allowed for easier following of conversations,but archived them as well. Fig. 1 is an example of a focused prompt. In thisassignment the Teaching Goals Inventory was hyperlinked so that bloggers couldgo there directly and complete the online inventory then easily return to the blog forcommenting. In response, there were comments posted by all 23 course participants.Our first lesson learned was to invite bloggers to create their own entry if they hadsomething novel they wanted to share. Otherwise, we encouraged commenting inresponse to our prompts.

7.2 Provide participation options

A goal of the course, with respect to the blog, was to expose unfamiliar faculty andgraduate instructors to the pedagogical possibilities that course blogs can create.Thus, we desired participation that was low stakes, yet motivating. One mechanismfor making the blog more appealing to participants was to build in options forparticipation. Even in the course section where the blog was required there wereoptions. In many cases, we designed blog prompts that were applicable to allparticipants. For example, we asked participants to experiment in their classroomwith one of numerous Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) (Angelo and Cross1993). The blog prompt read: Comment on the blog about how your experiment witha new CAT went. What did you like about it? What didn’t you like? Anything you’dchange next time? Also, comment on any other strategies you already use in yourcourses that you’ve found to be effective. In other cases, bloggers could select fromamong a brief menu of alternatives. For example, we altered the Teaching GoalsInventory (TGI) assignment slightly for the blended course. After reading an articleand self-administering the TGI, the bloggers were invited to comment on ONE of thefollowing: (1) Reactions/thoughts on the Pedagogy of the Distressed (Tompkins1990), or (2) Your reaction to your results of the TGI—Were the results as you wouldexpect? Did anything surprise you? If so, what? Providing these varied optionsallowed participants to select the activity most meaningful to them and also variedthe topics discussed in the resulting comments, providing a more interesting experi-ence for those monitoring their peers’ contributions.

7.3 Recognize the many faces of participation

Midway through the CCT we solicited feedback about participants’ experience todate. One question specifically addressed the extent of participation on the blog. Itwas evident from the blog comment threads and entries in both courses that many of

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our participants were commenting and some were even creating new entries andexperimenting with embedding videos and other media. What was not at all apparent,but which we learned from the feedback, was that nearly everyone not engaged inactive commenting and posting was still reading the blog. This activity is oftendefined as ‘lurking,’ and is considered a form of passive participation in onlinecommunities (Du 2006). Once reading and following comment threads became partof the definition, participation was nearly 100 %.

In the future, we would consider adding tracking software, such as GoogleAnalytics, to the blog. By using Analytics, we can add another dimension to thedata, allowing us to see how many users are actively visiting the blog to read course-related content. Analytics will also reveal what links participants are visiting themost, assisting future revision efforts for the CCT.

7.4 Require it

Blog activity exceeded our expectations for both course groups. We queried our face-to-face group (the section not required to participate on the blog) about changes wecould implement to increase blog participation even further. The resounding responsewas: require it. It was clear there was interest in the blog. But since blogging was notrequired for this group, it simply did not make the priority list for some. High-achieving and busy graduate and postdoctoral instructors complete tasks basedon priority. For them, if something is a requirement then it is a priority and itgets done. Contributing to blog conversation was not time consuming, but itwas also not required. We learned that even simple blog commenting fell fromsome participants’ priority lists simply because blog activity was not compul-sory. Had blog activity been required, participants assured us they would havedone it. They would have found a way.

7.5 Summarize and refer to blog activity in class

Whether we were meeting with our face-to-face group as usual or meeting ourblended cohort for the periodic on-site visits, we began each session by projectingthe blog onto the screen in class, summarizing what participants had been discussingsince we last met, and highlighting the comments of particular relevance or interest.This, we found, was a way to reinforce those who commented, motivate those whohad yet to try, and use the blog content to segue into the next teaching topic.

7.6 Be active and visible

Among the responsibilities of an instructor who is employing a course blog is toparticipate in it, to be a presence in the community of bloggers, and to drive adoptionof blogging as a course habit. We were a presence on our course blog from itsinception and cannot imagine doing otherwise. Only by visiting frequently, respond-ing to comments, and generally tracking blog conversations were we able to ade-quately perpetuate relevant conversations, dispel misconceptions about content,weigh in on issues of interest, model behavior, and generally build rapport in ouronline conversation space.

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7.7 Keep it conversational

A blog is designed for two-way communication. After an early misstep, we learned tokeep our tone conversational in the CCT. In one of the first assignments for the blendedcourse, we asked participants to read a series of poorly-written learning objectives thatwere posted to the blog then offer revisions to improve them. It was a one-way assign-ment: Share an improved learning objective. The expectation was that the objectivewould be rewritten and simply posted in a communal space where everyone could seeit. The prompt did not invite interaction. There were comments but not conversation.They were just answers made public. It was the last prompt we designed that way. Welearned quickly not to stray from the spirit of blogs, to keep the tone conversationalrather than instructive. We realized that with blogs the conversation is the instruction.Our graduate student group in CCT-1 seemed to understand this inherently. Following aparticipant authored entry reflecting on a particularly engaging CCT session, one candidcommenter reported, I thought this was a great activity! I was most interested in theteaching-a-skill-group’s lesson. I’m trying to figure out exactly what teaching alanguage is, and then how best to tackle it. I think it is a combination betweenteaching a skill, teaching a problem solving strategy, and teaching content. I’d beinterested to see what other people think. Is there a specific type of learning that fitsyour field the best, or is it a combination? If it’s a combination of these, how do yourcombine them or focus on a certain type?

7.8 Expect to invest time

A course blog can result in substantial value added to a course. But it takes an investmentof time on the part of the course instructor or other blog administrator. Time is requiredto write posts and prompts, monitor conversations, respond to comments, and to addrelevant content (e.g., hyperlinks, videos). Our data also suggest that the way the courseis structured has an impact on the amount of facilitator time required to encourageparticipation. For instance, we found that in our blended course, where session plansdictated blog activity, the facilitators spent more time at the beginning of the course, butwere then able to let regular session plans and content drive participation. When thecourse was face-to-face, however, facilitators were regular contributors to the blogspace, as it seemed to require more consistent modeling.

As with many new classroom techniques, with course blogs we found much of theadditional time is spent up front in generating the initial material. While we expect toreuse many of the posts and prompts in future CCT sessions, considerable time willstill be budgeted to monitor and respond to individual conversations unique to eachclass cohort. We also learned, however, that this is time well spent, as it promotesconversation and community within the course and, when done well, is something ofquality for the larger web community.

8 Conclusion

In this paper, we have presented our experience as faculty developers implementing acourse blog for the first time with two cohorts of university faculty. Naturally,

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teaching in general involves a certain amount of risk-taking, but incorporating a new andunfamiliar technology into a course can be a high-stakes affair that many faculty are justnot willing to attempt without a certain degree of familiarity. For a course blog, thecomplexity of the technology offers a significant barrier to entry for many faculty andgraduate instructors, one that is difficult to move past via short workshops and “showand tell” sessions by faculty developers. However, if implemented successfully, courseblogs have powerful potential to support course goals and learning objectives. Imple-menting a course blog in our 8-week Courses in College Teaching allowed us to exposeinstructors at our university to some of the benefits of this technology. Faced with a newchallenge of facilitating simultaneous CCTs—and in two different formats—we wereable to engage participants in both groups using course blogs. Participants in bothgroups availed themselves of opportunities to extend class discussions by sharingreactions and insights, to add to the repository of course materials and helpful relatedresources, to solicit advice and feedback on new strategies they were trying, and topractice blog-related skills in an authentic, but safe space.

Wrestling with implementation decisions across both contexts we found ways toencourage reflection, extend discussions, and invite experimentation and sharing.Along the way we learned valuable strategies for motivating, monitoring, and main-taining blog participation. In being asked to expand our course to multiple sessions indifferent formats and to different audiences, our CCT experience was not unlike whatmany faculty and graduate student instructors face in the wake of continuing budgetcuts and increasing class sizes. Although such circumstances are not a prerequisite forincorporating technology in the classroom, it is often these kinds of challenges thatmotivate us to try something new. In modeling the use of this technology, our hope isthat our CCT participants will have another tool they can use to meet such challenges.

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