Another reason for the blog reluctance outlined in Blog 1, was that students said they wanted to be able to process their ideas privately before sharing them with others. The students’ position countered two key requirements for blogs, the first is that ongoing thinking is shared as it emerges (i.e. an early stage in the learning), which I explore here and secondly that this thinking is shared with others (See Blog 3).
In part, immediate sharing within blogs provides a way of tracking and therefore encouraging activity. I must do something to show I am doing something. However, blogs are designed to provoke a particular mode of activity described as engagement. Engagement in this blog, and in MA Performance: Society, is positioned as dialogue with the specific materials/activities (articles, discussions workshops) identified by the course. I notice my joy when a student name checks an activity or reading from class in their submission. Perhaps blogs are popular in HE because in part they act as a form of reassurance for tutors that they are heard – but does this make them genuine tools for higher level learning?
Engagement with course materials could easily be evidenced within a long form essay but blogs invite students to demonstrate their ongoing engagement: their week-by-week encounters with new ideas. Unlike essays, which require time for processing and deeper thought, blogs invite students to reveal early, fresh responses and feelings around the work. Potentially, at its best, the form encourages an articulation of the situated generation of new knowledge: I encountered this at this point and now I think this. This processual activity has the potential to encourage a positional awareness in students, as Morris argues, regarding the way they ‘make meaning of the information they acquire in the context of their own prior beliefs and experiences.’ (Morris 2018:68).
In phenomenological terms, all knowledge is generated in the encounter of that which is long known and immediately experienced (Fraleigh 2009). But the way I am writing here – has a summative tone. This might be because as a dance researcher, like my students, I generate knowledge through practice– that is my process, my immediate response. Sense making does not always take place through words, which I use more often as a summative tool to share findings. This connects to another complexity of blogs, although facilitating images and film, is that they are predicated on words, which makes a staying with the processual quite hard.
Sharing anything early on can feel vulnerable, as findings may be partial, superficial or just not very interesting. This writing is not as good as writing I would do at the end of a year of study. An assessment predicated on revealing process, however, makes sense for an arts course where refining process is assumed to refine the resulting artworks. If a student doesn’t already work like this, then blog forms would encourage them do so. For students already engaged in reflective cycles, as the MAPS students were, blogs may feel like interruptions, demanding pre-emptive conclusions.
Next steps
So, whilst this blog has made me think about blogging as a way of evidencing reflective activity, blogs still feel like a medium where early insights can be ‘sentenced to meaning’ (Phelan 1997:17). Going forward, I would be interested in designing assessments for MAPS with a greater distinction between methods and outcomes. Perhaps the blog could still be used to generate/make processes visible but students are not required to make sense of it until much later?
References
Fraleigh, S. (2018) Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance. University of Illinois Press: Chicago.
Morris, M. A. (2018) Somewhere in between: Blogging as an intermediate and accessible space. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Vol 11:1, pp 67-81.
Phelan, P. (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge.
Hernández-Ramos, P. (2004). Web logs and online discussions as tools to promote reflective practice. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, Vol 3:1, Summer.