This blog is a part of my production project for the CULT3020 class at Newcastle Uni. Of all the different and wildly creative forms of online communication technology, blogging is simultaneously one of the very simplest and one of the most versatile. The simplicity and openness of the blog allows for the easy sharing of knowledge and opinions, and within the community of blog-readers and writers, adds huge amounts to potential learning environments.
Blogs allow for a new and distinctly 21st century style of learning, where the strict structures of academia can give away to greater freedoms for people to interpret and present their learning experience in a dynamic way. Scholarly pursuits remain prevalent though and are in fact made even more convenient through the ability of blogs to provide words from, links to and opinions on academic works.
In a 1999 work, Allen analyzed the potential of the internet as a facilitator of learning and academic discourse within higher education.
"The Really important step forward that universities can take is to begin fostering communities that are less specifically connected to units and are, instead, about issues, subjects, disciplines or professions and which are distinct from those already forming in the virtual world of the Internet by being associated with overall courses offered by that university. Student membership of these communities should become integral to their course completion; where necessary, whole components of the course should become (instead of 'study') knowledge-based community participation (Allen 1999)
Jeremy Williams and Joanne Jacobs interpret this as particularly applicable to the idea of blogs. In their 2004 work Williams and Jacobs specifically research the capability of blogs as learning spaces within higher education. By studying a set of students participating in a course involving work with blogs, they deduced that students enthusiastically agree with and promote the use of blogs within coursework. It is important to note that as time passes the already overwhelming majority of Generation Y people within student communities continue to increase. University demographics are increasingly internet-savvy, with youth raised in the 1990s. I think it's important that internet communication tools are used to modernise and revitalise stagnant education systems. Obviously it goes without saying that the internet's databasing of scholarly material is helpful to academia and that social networking sites like Facebook are communication revolutions. But technologies like Blogs sit in an extremely important middle position between these two extremes, with structures and interfaces well suited to academic pursuits but the equal element of informality, diversity and reader feedback.
For this project I'll be using this blog as a kind of home base. I'll be providing in each post a piece of creative production relating to the course themes, using a few different online tools.
References.Williams, J & Jacobs, J (2004). Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector. Australasian Journal Of Educational Technology, 20 (2), pp 232-247
Allen, M (1999). Don't be a troll! Using the Internet for successful higher education.
