Personal Reflective Blogs

Personal reflection and internal distillation constitute a large part of the educational process, which takes place independently of the classroom, whether on or off campus. They can be facilitated by blogs acting as personal diaries, addressing a specific theme or, more generally, offering personal reflection on any matters that affect their daily lives. They can cover anything from general orientation - how to plan leisure and study activities in university life - through to figuring out that confusing concept in the last lecture. Staff can also benefit from maintaining a reflective blog, whether a seasoned senior manager or a first-time lecturer. For example, a vice-chancellor might consider offering personal reflections on the university's first official inter-faith service, a response to the Indian Ocean disasters of December 2004. The blog can record its conception and planning, the event itself and any personal reflections. It thus shows the bigger picture, highlighting some activities and thoughts that may not ordinarily receive much attention.

Personal reflections featured in the early use of blogs. In 'Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education' [9] Oravec states that weblogs foster the development of unique voices associated with particular individuals; the development of Weblogs over time can empower students to become more analytical and critical, responding to the resources they receive. Indeed, used in this way, blogs are entirely what the author is making of the world and can cast light on implicit assumptions in teaching.

For the educator, especially tutor, blogs have a number of attractions including:

• through publication on the Web, the tutor may have convenient access to view the blog and also, where appropriate, provide responses;
• further, it is possible to interact with blogs, to guide the author (tutee, say) to address particular issues;
• the ongoing nature supports longitudinal surveys on a continual basis;
• blogs can be grouped together, enabling tutors to gain a broad picture of their students as a whole, and highlighting particular issues.

Personal reflective blogs can be facilitated in a number of ways, including:

• in form - make them intuitive to view and navigate;
• for contribution - make writing and publishing easy;
• for application developers - make the software simple;
• in use - allow free expression without constraining unnecessarily.

Blogs used in this way are characteristic of what may be referred to as a 'Personal Learning Environment' (PLE), which focuses on an individual's own educational space, which can be said to 'wrap around the learner.' Blogs can fit very comfortably in the PLE context, providing a medium that facilitates reflection about life over an extended period as well as capturing something in an instant - an instantaneous note to capture a concept before it escapes.

Many of these kinds of activities (reflecting, recording and so on) are carried out by students in 'Personal Development Planning' (PDP), which UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs) are required to support by September 2005, as detailed by the Higher Education Academy [10]. Students are required to build portfolios that showcase their record of achievement. Blogging activities can form part of the process, particularly contributing to the portfolios, though much depends upon their nature. Generally, blogs can be spontaneous, informal and only lightly structured, whereas PDP systems are more deliberate, formal and highly structured, perhaps with checklists and context-specific vocabularies. What may be possible is to import blog content in PDP systems, to support more structured reflections, or possibly work up the text to a more formal record.