Today I felt as though I were attending a staff meeting of the future (though I am well aware that for some of you this would be the present and for yet others, the past) at a training college for pedagogues today. This is a particularly Scandinavian profession and probably equates with nursery nurse or pre-school teacher training. However graduates can not only work in kindergartens but also with older children in the widespread network of after-school clubs and other youth activities here in Denmark.
The students start their courses with a couple of months of college based study and then go out on work placement at kindergartens and so on for about six months before returning to college for a longer period of study. Their teachers had identified that the work experience placement could be quite isolating for the students since they go out after only a very short period at college and so they decided that they would try to foster both heightened learning awareness and maintain the fragile social bonds by suggesting their students keep blogs. They were also experimenting with electronic portfolios.
I found the meeting very positive because these were not ICT evangelists but a group of thoughtful professionals who had agreed to try a strategy in a fairly low risk manner and were willing to discuss how to improve the experience for current and future cohorts.
Instead of me arriving as an outsider and telling them that they might experience this or should think about doing that, the way the meeting went was that they were discussing what they had observed and I noticed that many of the big issues arose spontaneously. These included:
1. Was it right to encourage the mixing of the social and work-related posts in one blog?
2. Had the student who had included pictures of the children on a trip got permission to upload those photographs?
3. How much should the lecturers feel obliged to read and respond to?
4. Do we need both a blog and a portfolio?
5. Should the portfolios continue to be private as some of them contained really useful reflective observations that did not then transfer to the blog?
6. The teaching team was open enough to consider uploading teaching materials into a shared materials bank.
7. Uploading teaching materials prior to a teaching session had meant that the students were noticably better prepared and arrived with relevant questions and additional references.
8. Negative posts are a problem so should there be posting rules? The consensus here was that promoting a discussion among the students should be enough to raise awareness and would also preserve the integrity of the idea that the students have control over their own blogs.
9. Should the e-portfolio replace exams? The consensus was that a first step could be that it counted for a percentage of the grade for the work experience.
10. Videos are potentially a very powerful tool for example in analysing how a physical education activity went but who would do the editing to find the key moments?
The session ended with a couple of the teachers setting up their own blogs and then everyone setting up a bloglines account so that they could gather all their student blog links in one place.
I was there as just another meeting participant listening and chipping in when asked. I will report back on where I think they may want further support in my role as project worker in the experience-based learning project but I really felt that they had the process under control and were willing enough to experiment at their own pace.
For me, it was great to see the next step in action rather than once again visiting an institution to explain what a blog is and how it may have some relevant application in teaching.
Keywords: blog, Bloglines, e-portfolio, experience-based learning, pedagogue
