The Issue of Privacy

Both student exercises required privacy: in the case of the medical students it was needed, for instance, to protect patient confidentiality; with the Chemistry feedback, it was necessary to allow honest appraisal of the teaching etc.

Pebble and other blog hosting services provide some means of restricting access, but this generally assumes that users are accessing the service directly through the Web interface and not via a third-party system. Yet, perhaps the key benefit of the Bodington VLE is that it can restrict access to selected groups of users that reflect the institutional hierarchy.

Especially useful are the access control mechanisms, available for each resource, which can be anything such as a general container, questionnaire, or discussion area. In all these cases, access can be set for any number of groups via an interface like the following example taken from Oxford's deployment:

Blogs in an Institutional Setting

Blogs offer considerable potential and so it is natural to ask: How to incorporate blogs in the institutional setting, particularly with existing e-learning systems? Should the institution offer a blog to all its staff and students? Very few universities offer blogs as a general service, one of the most well known being 'Warwick Blogs', provided by Warwick University [14]. This is a completely home-grown and heavily customised e-learning system built around blogs and integrated with local directory services, so is currently not an option for other institutions.

So should other educational establishments follow Warwick's example? It is not easy to give a general answer, but a few observations can be made. First, if blogs require some degree of privacy, especially within particular groups, then public hosting services are unlikely to be suitable, not least because the institution has no control - the extreme scenario being that a hosting service goes offline. Given the simplicity of blogs, it might be tempting to think that blog hosting is easy. While it may be straightforward for a small deployment, in a particular department, scaling up across an institution presents a far greater challenge.

If providing an institutional blog, one question that ought to be considered is: How many blogs are appropriate for an individual? Do people prefer to maintain just one blog in which they can store all their reflections, relating to work and study, or would they prefer to keep separate blogs depending upon the context? The judicious use of categories might enable a single blog to fulfil these roles, but there is added complexity as personal circumstances (including their learning contexts) change over time. As blogging continues to grow in popularity, it becomes increasingly likely that schoolchildren will have blog accounts on public services before moving to Further and Higher Education. Just as it might be the case that there need to be compelling reasons why students ought to drop their Hotmail accounts in favour of the university system, so they will need to have spelt out the value of having university blogs. As time spent at a particular university is normally only a few years, there is another issue about what happens on departure?

Trends are difficult to predict, but there will quite likely be a need to import and export the content easily in some standards-compliant way, because in contrast to the transience of e-mail, blogs provide a consolidated personal record that can be referenced in the future. Hence they need to be portable.

Issues for Educators

For a tutor who might consider offering guidance to a student blogger, there are a number of challenges and caveats.

The quality of the entries can vary considerably: some contributions were difficult to follow, being staccato in style and very lax in grammar, though usually not going quite as far as SMS 'textspeak' with all its abbreviations. Thus, basic guidelines may be needed on the use of the English language, perhaps assisted by some monitoring. Further, keeping a blog going for any lengthy period requires a lot of commitment and there is a risk of 'blog rot', in which blogs become neglected and fall into disuse. So there needs to be a good reason to get started and it must be sustainable for at least some while.

A common complaint is that blogs contain such a diversity of thoughts that it becomes difficult to find relevant points, though it may be argued that many aspects are interdependent and need the bigger picture, which a blog can provide. There is always the danger of mental proliferation, resulting in blogs going off topic: the empty boxes in blogs don't provide explicit means to take an idea and focus on it and refine it further, so more effort is required by authors to keep contributions relevant, with the need for guidance and vigilance by tutors.

Many blog systems provide some means of structuring blogs, which can mitigate these disadvantages, notably the facility to group entries through categories. Categories may be from a controlled vocabulary, completely user-defined, or a mixture of both. Similarly, some systems support tags, which specify a property of an object, and can apply to a particular entry. Where structuring elements are scarce, the choice can have a very important impact.

Students are likely to put more effort into blogs if they feel that someone is taking notice of their blogs on more than an occasional basis. However, it would probably take quite a lot of experience to know how to interpret and respond appropriately: an individual might make challenging assertions about workload, which could be well-founded or an indication of other problems that need a pastoral response. In such cases, having a group of student blogs to compare side by side is valuable.

Project Observations

These blogs were very elementary, with little use made of comments, though students did read other blogs. There is certainly potential for much richer use of the facilities, especially where the work is more oriented towards making use of online resources. Yet, this was already a fairly complex operation involving several kinds of PDAs, desktop PCs, and servers, though the complexity was hidden as much as possible from the user, so that the moblogging itself became a fairly simple process.

At the end of the exercises students were asked to fill in a survey to report back on the exercise. The initial technical barriers seemed to be overcome as can be seen in the feedback obtained, but not everyone takes to blogging, so alternatives may have to be provided. It is difficult to say to what extent mobility aids the reflection process with a relatively small sample and no control experiment (blogging without PDAs). However, when asked 'Where there any advantages to using the PDA to write your blogs?' all but one responded positively, several citing the convenience of writing without constraints on place and time - 'even in lectures' and 'easier than sitting at a desk.' One comment was particularly interesting for its suggestion about note taking - 'I could do small pieces at a time and build up a piece.'

Whereas the blog hosting solution proved very satisfactory, the general immaturity of moblogging tools was disappointing. Few clients were available and most of these were limited to particular platforms, contained bugs, or lacked important functionality; few were released with open source licences. Setting up the devices and tools can be very fiddly, which raises the question of support from IT staff, who may not have any resources allocated for training in this area. Current products are generally marketed at mobile phones, reflecting the growth in that market. However, the phone clients are typically designed for instant capture of events, rather than sustained reflection, with small screens that cannot hold much text and able to store very few entries in the cache. Altogether, this environment may offer convenience but also may be encouraging short attention spans (as well as large phone bills).

Even so, moblogging did work quite well, despite the scarcity of dependable software.

Reflections from Students

The requirements gathering proved unexpectedly rich and deserves closer attention, even though the project was primarily about tool development. Considerable content was generated, covering learning processes, teaching style, academic provision, timetabling and many other aspects. Its extent can only be briefly covered by a few paragraphs, but it is hoped that the following, gathered from the Chemistry undergraduates, indicates the range and depth of what was recorded.

Students expressed themselves very freely, showing few signs of reticence. Their feedback was constructive, for example, commenting if the pace was too fast: one student recorded that a lecturer wrote so much that his hand ached and further there was little pause for explanation so that he could digest the concepts. This was evidently a disincentive to reading what had been written as in a later entry he noted that he had just come to realise that the notes were actually very thorough, covering most of what he needed for his tutorials.

At the same time, students would give credit where they thought it was due.

'I've found our tutor .. to be clear and very happy to pause in her method to explain what she is doing if we don't quite see something that is usually quite obvious. This is really helpful to set in the mind the basics of the topic.'

They also remarked on whether lecturers were enthusiastic or appeared uninterested, which affected their own motivation: one whose manner was 'ever-enthusiastic' meant 'i never get bored in his lectures even though usually i find the maths pretty hard.' Some observations were perspicacious: about one tutor it was written, 'clearly had lined up the topics that he wanted to touch upon and had it in mind where he was going to take the discussion.'

Entries could be instructive and humorous: one student remarked on how practical books were very easy to follow and that a demonstrator was very helpful, especially in providing directions on where to find the dustpan and brush for broken glass!

After a few weeks, some general changes were noted. Students recorded when they felt they were making progress and gaining in confidence, attributing some of this to they way they were being taught. 'The work load has not increased as much as i thought it would, if anything getting lighter! Either that or i'm getting used to it!' This would be encouraging not only for the student, but also for a tutor.

Some of the reflections themselves changed in nature and would consider wider implications. For instance, one entry compared people's backgrounds in relation to the subject matter:

'I have found it hard to follow a lot of the mathematical content of the course so far, not having studied further maths at school, but there are also students who had taken gap years and have not applied functional maths for nearly 16 months... this in my mind would make the material almost unapproachable.'

Observations were sometimes at several levels. For instance, in one entry a student makes an observation primarily about lecturing style, in which he feels the lecturer ought to take more time to interact with the audience than the blackboard, as he continues to write new notes on the board while explaining something that he had introduced previously without checking that everyone is following. The student then reflects on the situation and sees the implications, seeing that this interaction would need extra time and ends up by suggesting the extension of the course by a lecture or two.

Linking PLEs with VLEs

Perhaps not surprisingly then, not a great deal has been done to connect PLEs and VLEs. Against this background, the JISC-funded RAMBLE Project [6] undertook to develop some linkage between PLEs and VLEs, so that at least the blogging activities could be imported into the VLE context. Thus RAMBLE's brief was to investigate the use of blogs as a reflective authoring activity in an educational context through two strands of work:

1. The off-line authoring of blog entries on a PDA and subsequent upload to a blog server.
2. The creation of a blogging component that will allow blog content to be integrated into the Bodington VLE [11].

The project recognised that there are existing patterns of activity that ought to be very amenable to blogging - such as the habit of Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, which can be any place, any time. Hence, in order to best realise working off site, the blogging was made mobile, i.e. participants each authored a 'moblog', where: 'A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile device, such as a cellular phone or PDA' [12].

Technical choices had to be made very quickly: after brief investigation, two kinds of PDA-based blogging clients were chosen, one using the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system and the other using Palm OS, which at the time were the two most popular platforms. Each device was also supplemented with a wireless infra-red foldaway keyboard, which was essential to support more than token input. The content was subsequently submitted to a blog hosting service ('blog server') on the Web via synchronisation with a networked desktop PC.

Most of the requirements were drawn from moblogging exercises undertaken by two groups of Oxford undergraduates (Year 1 Chemistry, and Year 5 Medical Sciences). It is worth noting that they were given short and simple briefs - the first group was to give feedback on lecture courses, tutorials and practicals, while the other was to record their learning experiences while on a clinical rotation. The blogs were authored over a period of a month or so, generally a couple of entries submitted each week. In addition, a project blog was maintained through the project period of about 6 months [13].

Particular attention was given to privacy. Most blogs, even personal diaries, are viewable by the public, but in the personal learning context, this is not always appropriate. These requirements made it really necessary to have control over the blog server in-house. So access to the blogs was set up so that there was only one owner per blog and the only others who could read and respond to the blogs were their peers plus the blog project supervisor and RAMBLE project team.

Experiences in Mobile Blogging from the RAMBLE Project

While blogs promise a number of potential benefits for personal reflection in the PLE context within an academic institution, there are many constraints, particularly in respect of structures. Most HEIs have some form of centrally hosted Virtual Learning Environment through which much of the online learning is mediated. In such environments, the emphasis is on delivery of information, generally not where substantial amounts of original content are authored by students, though submissions may be uploaded through an interface. Many VLE systems have been designed as self-contained environments with a great deal of functionality, but are often monolithic and complex. Further, their use often imposes other constraints: for instance, most working has to be carried out while online.