Earlier this year I gave my final year physiotherapy students a blogging assignment as part of their Professional Ethics module. The goal of the assignment was to read a selection of articles that were relevant to coursework that had been discussed in class, to reflect on those readings, and then to post a blog entry as a reflection. Others in the class could then read those posts and provide feedback in the form of comments, hopefully stimulating further reflection and discussion.
In general, the assignment was a great success among the students, with many of them reporting high levels of satisfaction with the project. For my own part, I’ve learned a huge amount, not only about the technical aspects of co-ordinating and supporting a project like this, but also in student behaviour and attitudes towards the use of blogging as part of the curriculum.
I presented the process we went through during this assignment at the SAAHE conference earlier this month, and you can see my presentation here. I’m also currently supervising an undergraduate research group who are evaluating the results of the platform as a means of facilitating reflection among students. Hopefully the results of that study will be published at some stage in the future.
Here’s a link to the project. I’d love to hear any feedback you might have. Please bear in mind that for many of these students, English is not their first language and prior to this assignment, none of them had any experience with blogging. In addition to that, about a third of them didn’t have access to the internet at home, and another third only had a dialup connection. In light of these challenges, I’m very proud of what they managed to achieve.
