In engineering education there is always a conversation about getting students to partake in metacognition i.e. thinking about thinking. There’s studies out in the universe that shows that having students self reflect and evaluate their own learning lends to better retention of the information given to them. But how does one go about doing so? Growing up I’m sure most people had a journal at one point – either personally or for academic reasonings. My question is: why’d we stop keeping them?
As the world migrated to the digital age, some people that I knew who were avid journalers migrated to web based blogging. Sites such as blogger, tumblr, and wordpress came about and people seemed to be evaluating which platform was best to tell their story – whatever that story was. If self reflection is a major key to retention of information and kids these days are always on their computer, why not turn to blogging, or some hybrid of it, in our classrooms?
“Have a corner of the web you control” – Doug Belshaw
One bittersweet thing about the internet is that you can be whomever you want to be. Now as an educator, I’d always need to know who my students are if I were to integrate this into my classroom. However, having a particular online presence allows a student to protect their anonymity amongst their peers while also providing ease of access to the student to reflect on their work. Blogs allow students to use the technology they love to use everyday for the purpose of enhancing their learning beyond the receipt of delivered content.
Great post! Your observation about how we stopped keeping journals at some point is interesting. If I had to guess, I would say this is one of the potential downsides of increased tech: information is so easily accessible that critical thinking (including metacognition) has become slightly less necessary, and “information overload” provides enough distraction that many people don’t want to spend time and energy writing down content based on their own experiences (e.g., “I should blog about what happened today–but first I want to watch a TV show, and check my Facebook newsfeed…”). So, I agree that blogging is a natural transition for those who want to share their experiences without having to do it old school.