Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments

Public participation in the Internet has continued to boom, aided in no small measure by the 'weblog' (or, simply, 'blog'), one of the most accessible means of online publication, a term that is rapidly entering common parlance. Blogs are authored by people from many walks of life and are of many kinds: for instance, Penny Garrod has shown how they can support reading groups and community links, such as news from local councillors [1]. They have also grown in sophistication from their humble origins as personal diaries, similar to the way that a simple solo sonata might lead eventually to a complex orchestral work. The facility to have multiple authors linking to each other offers exciting research possibilities for exploring social learning networks and their intricate harmonies.

Evidence of the educational benefits is accumulating and has been trumpeted in the media, even for young children [2], though there is relatively little formal literature extolling their merits in scholarly publications, especially for Higher Education (HE). However, this is gradually emerging: for instance, in 'Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector' [3], Williams and Jacobs conclude that based on case studies, blogs can be an effective aid to teaching and learning, pointing out that students are provided with a high level of autonomy independent of the campus, while simultaneously providing opportunity for greater interaction with peers. Ferdig and Trammell indicate that blogs support social interaction while giving students full control and ownership over their online content [4]. A fair number of other references are provided in the Educause Resource Center [5], showing an increasing level of positive engagement.

While much of the attention has focused on community interactions, the UK Government's emphasis on widening participation and lifelong learning focuses on an individual's personalised learning and development, where an individual needs to reflect internally. Blogs can facilitate this process simply and effectively, especially when the object of reflection is their study; and the experiences they have will be of value not just to themselves, but to others.

At some stage the reflective blogs will need to be related to their learning environments. The Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments (RAMBLE) Project [6] has recognised that these institutional systems are often quite remote from this 'blogosphere'. Such a recognition has motivated the project to investigate how personal reflections in the HE context may be supported through mobile blogging and the provision of stepping stones into a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), typically core to an institution's e-learning infrastructure. The methodology and some findings are reported below.