Academic Exchange Quarterly Winter
2009 ISSN 1096-1453 Volume 13, Issue
4
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The Use of Blogs as a Knowledge
Management Tool
Delaney J. Kirk,
Timothy L. Johnson,
Kirk, Ph.D., is an associate
professor of management who blogs at www.delaneykirk.com. Johnson is an adjunct
professor and Chief Accomplishment Officer at CarpeFactum
who blogs at www.carpefactum.com.
Abstract
Based on the authors’
experience with using class blogs in 22 classes over a three year time frame,
this paper discusses three approaches, instructor-focused, learner-focused, and
community-focused, as ways to teach both explicit and tacit knowledge. Both
benefits and concerns of using blogs in the classroom are addressed.
Introduction
According to Diana Oblinger,
Vice President of EDUCAUSE, a major teaching challenge present in today’s
college classrooms is helping our students acquire both explicit and tacit
knowledge. As she notes,
Technology
challenges people's assumptions about what it means to be educated…
Moreover,
technology changes both the ways in which we learn and the ways in which we
conceive of the learning process...We have grown increasingly aware that
learning facts is not enough. Knowledge management in particular is leading us
to question our focus on explicit knowledge, gained from textbooks, and our
relative neglect of tacit knowledge, gained from experience. Tacit knowledge
consists of knowing how to get things done, wisdom acquired through years of
practice. (Morrison & Oblinger, 2002, p. 2).
As faculty, we are
experienced in presenting explicit knowledge on a particular subject. However,
organizations want employees who are able to integrate both explicit and tacit
knowledge in the workplace (Asllani, Ettkin, & Somasundar, 2008). By using
the Internet as a resource, we have “opportunities for treating teaching and
learning as truly social activities where knowledge is built through
interaction and dialogue rather than lectures and recitation” (Deitering &
Huston, 2004, p. 273). The students can learn from us, each other, and virtual
experts online. In addition, technology accommodates diverse styles of learning
and allows students to be more active in growing their own new knowledge
(Watkins, 2005). In this paper, we discuss
our experiment with one type of technology, weblogs (commonly known as blogs), to
help our students gain explicit and tacit knowledge but in ways that are effective
and efficient for both students and faculty.
Our Decision to Use Blogs as a Pedagogical Tool
Three years ago we began experimenting
with class blogs because we believed these would be an efficient way to
communicate class expectations and to engage students in conversation with us
as professors, with their fellow classmates, and with outside resources. We saw advantages to blogs in allowing us to
insist on, and track, 100 percent participation in course discussions, to
provide links to timely articles and podcasts, and to invite experts into the conversation,
all to create an environment where students not only experience the subject
matter but also learn how to find credible sources for learning in the
future. Thus, a familiarity with how
blogs can be used would benefit the students beyond the classroom experience.
We came to our decision to
try class blogs as part of our course design for a number of reasons.
We were encouraged by
Deitering and Huston’s findings that blogs were “easy to integrate with the
traditional classroom” (2004, p.277).We liked Martins and Kellermanns’ (2004)
claim that “transferring administrative and purely informational aspects of
instruction…[outside the classroom] frees up class time for students to work on
interpersonal and communication skills” (p. 8). Another reason for our decision
to use a class blog was ‘time on task.’
One of the authors began teaching a weekend class that met only once a
month and he was worried about the ‘fadeout effect,’ knowing that many of his
students wouldn’t think about the material between classes. We also believed it important for all of our
students to participate in class discussions but, despite our best efforts, on
many days only a small percentage of the students ever had anything to say. And
finally, and most importantly, we wanted to see our students take greater ownership
of their own learning, not only for our classes but in their future lives.
Choosing a Focus for the Class Blog
Before introducing a class
blog to our students, we had to determine the focus it should take to help in
achieving our learning objectives. We
determined that this depended upon the course being taught, our teaching
philosophies, and the comfort level we each had with giving up some control in
our classrooms.
Edbauer writes that the
typical response she gets from colleagues when she shows them some of the blogs
on the Internet is, “Cool! But, how in
the world would I actually use this” in my class? (Edbauer, et al, 2005, p. 3). How blogs are used depends on the professor’s
teaching style and course subject matter.
We determined three possible approaches that varied from
instructor-focused, featuring one-way communication from faculty to students;
learner-focused, using two-way communication between faculty and students, or
an interactive community-focused teaching tool between and among the students
and the professor, as well as others identified as experts to create a virtual
learning environment.
Instructor-focused Blogs
The simplest way to use a
blog is as a one-stop source where the professor posts syllabi, assignments,
and links to articles and websites for the students to read. Faculty retain
ownership and students are expected to access the blog on a regular basis. The
blog allows the professor to be more efficient as he or she doesn’t have to
make copies of course materials and can point students to the blog for answers
to questions on assignments. Sample
papers or grading rubrics can be posted to guide students in understanding
expectations. The blog is also a good
way to hyperlink to visual aids used in class.
An instructor-focused blog may be the best approach for classes that
don’t involve a lot of discussion. As
noted by a colleague who teaches finance, “I deal with questions such as,
‘what’s the present value of $500 received five years from now if the interest
rate is 8%?’ The one and only right
answer: $340. Not much discussion needed
here.”
However, we found that it is
easy to move beyond ‘the student as passive recipients of content’ stage by
posting weekly questions or links to relevant articles and requiring the
students to comment on these. Quibble (2005)
used a blog to post scenarios of a poorly written business letter in his
Business Communication courses. The students then respond as to what should be
done to correct the letter using techniques they were learning in class. Even
our finance colleague mentioned earlier would be able to link to current
articles and have the students read and comment, thus allowing her to see if
the students understood the concepts being taught.
Learner-focused Blogs
In this approach, the
professor would expect the students to be more active participants in the
blog. Learning can occur peer-to-peer in
addition to teacher-to-student. Students
could write their own posts or comment on what they had been learning in class,
relating the course topics to work and personal experiences. Students could create their own portfolios of
their writing and get feedback from their fellow classmates. They could also create learning journals, a
technique strongly advocated by Ramsey (2002) except in this case these would
be online and easy to access offsite.
Faculty can have students create their own individual blogs on topics
either chosen by the instructor or by the students themselves. In this instance, the student creates the
blog, and the professor (and potentially classmates) is the commenter, thus
giving the student more control over his or her own learning experience.
Sparacio and Witonsky (2006)
advocate using learner-focused blogs as they believe that “teaching can be
significantly enhanced by the integration of blogging” (p. 2). They have their students in a course in Logic
& Reasoning develop their own blogs on a topic of their choice that they
then write about during the course of the semester. According to them, the students tend to put
more effort and care in their work as they get to choose their subject matter
and they know that their peers in the class are reading their work.
Liz Kleinfeld (2008) at
Community-focused blogs
A third approach to using
blogs is to involve participants from outside the class itself. Students could be required to find, read, and
evaluate blogs from “experts” outside class on assigned topics and then to
share this information with their classmates.
Tryon (2006) incorporated the requirement that his students read blogs in
his first-year English composition classes in order to encourage students to
make a connection between the classroom and the ‘real world.’
Students can also develop
questions related to course topics and contact others outside of class who
participate as “guest teachers.” One of
the authors of this paper was asked questions in class on how to manage people
with disabilities. She went on the
Internet and found a man
who was blind and another
whose legs were paralyzed who both agreed to help. She then had the students post their own
questions on the blog. As noted by Gould
(2002), “research evidence and common sense tell us that students learn more
about a subject when they are emotionally involved with the intellectual
context being taught” (p. 23). Thus, designing the course to provoke curiosity
and emotional reactions can bring about insights and learning.
In some of our
other classes, we contacted authors of books that the students were reading and
asked them to contribute comments and feedback on the class blog. The students were very excited to have
meaningful interaction with the person whose book they were discussing. As one student noted, “It gave a whole new
meaning to my reading of his book.” Opening up the learning process to include
personal connections with book and journal authors, subject matter experts with
their own blogs, and others including potential employers created a virtual
learning community unlike anything we had ever done or even envisioned in the
physical classroom.
What Have We Learned From Our Use Of Weblogs In Our
Classes?
We have experimented with using
blogs as a pedagogical tool in undergraduate courses in Principles of
Management, Organizational Behavior, Managing Diversity, and Human Resource
Management as well as in graduate courses in Leadership, Creativity, Project
Management, and Corporate Politics. Course management systems such as
Blackboard and WebCT have blog capabilities and there are also other free or
inexpensive sites such as Typepad, Blogger, or Edublogs. We found that we only needed to be tech comfy, not tech
savvy, as all blog writing is done in a Word document and does not require any
programming skills. For the most part,
students are comfortable with using the Internet so the format was easy for
them to use. The most recent information
posted is listed at the top of the blogpage and the students can even have
updates forwarded to their email accounts.
We found blogs to be much
more useful than just discussion boards in terms of ownership and ability to
hyperlink to journal or newspaper articles and other blogs. A blog is controlled by the person who
created it; others can comment but cannot create blogpost content unless given
administrative access. As noted by
Trammell and Ferdig, “On a discussion board anyone can start a thread of
conversation and all contributors have the same editorial authority” (2004, p.
61). We agree with Asllani, Ettkin, and Somasundar
(2008) that blogs appear more successful than discussion boards in
communicating tacit knowledge.
We asked our students for
feedback about their experience of the class blogs at the end of each
semester. The students’ responses were
overwhelmingly positive as noted in the following major themes:
Blogging invites more students into the conversation
Students who were unwilling
to speak up in class indicated they felt more comfortable writing their
thoughts and responding to the thoughts of others in a blog/comment
format. In addition, using a blog
allowed students with different learning styles (for example, those students who
would rather reflect before answering) to interact with the class.
I found the blog to be very effective as a learning tool, mainly
because I am one of those more quiet people in class. Things don’t always come
to my mind right away, but once I give them time to sink in and realize how I
really feel, this is when I find the blog to be quite useful…
Blogging extends the conversation
Allowing students to
participate in mini-conversations via blogs keeps the classroom conversation
alive even when the students are not physically present. As universities create flexible class times
and schedules such as night and weekend courses to meet the needs of the
students, using blogs may be even more useful in preventing the fade-out
effect.
Often after class ended, I would think of good points
that I could have added to the discussion. However, after the week’s gap, those
ideas are long forgotten. Also, some students are not as outspoken as others
and often their opinions do not get heard. Having the ability to share these
unspoken thoughts would benefit the class as a whole.
Classroom blogging provides a “safe”
mechanism for introducing students to social media
Even with the
proliferation of blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, there are many students who are
only vaguely aware of social media’s business possibilities. Once students see how blogs can be used, they
begin to realize the professional benefits of extending “conversations” to the
online world. While some students resisted
the classroom blog at first, they quickly embraced the medium and started
seeing ways to use these in both their professional and social lives.
The
blog is great! I know I’m still being dragged in but rest assured that I’m
coming around. … The “peer pressure” actually did wonders for me. I will be
entering the blog world soon. I definitely have seen the social aspect work and
it does make me very curious about the professional benefits.
Blogging makes the students into subject
matter experts
The process of
creating a blogpost or answering a well-crafted question requires students to
search for, filter, and then share information found on the Internet. The process exposes students to vast amounts
of information and in the process makes them become more knowledgeable on a
topic. Doing this on a regular basis
“creates a repetitive process where the blogger student can build on what he
learned last week and find more advanced information for the current week,” thus
increasing both explicit and tacit knowledge (Trammell & Ferdig, 2004, p.
62).
Blogging helps students take ownership of
their own learning
We have been
pleasantly surprised by the depth and breadth of our students’ blog comments
and posts. They tended to spend more
time and effort than required by the assignments. When given a choice of
using a blog or a more traditional paper method of journaling, those with blogs
appeared to be more creative as they were leveraging online resources, linking
to other blogs, and finding meaningful graphics. The students who wrote
in more traditional ways tended to stay strictly within the stated expectations
of the assignment.
The Downside to Using Blogs
Although we found many
advantages to using blogs, there are disadvantages as well. Finding the time to
post on the blog and read comments made by students can feel overwhelming. It’s important for faculty to budget time to
provide adequate feedback. Spending more
time reading and responding earlier in the semester seemed to help prevent
problems later. Setting a deadline by which students must comment was very
important to allow time to read and respond.
We have considered setting a word limit to make reading the students’
comments more manageable and to aid the students in learning to be more
succinct in their writing.
Another issue can be the
comfort level of the professor with technology and new teaching
methodologies. While writing a blogpost
is essentially as easy as sending an email, the prospect of using it as a
classroom tool can be daunting. We found
that using an instructor-focused approach the first time helped with the
learning curve of having a class blog.
Some students and faculty may
perceive communicating online as a loss of a personal connection. It does negate the ability to observe body
language and vocal tone, both of which contribute heavily to the communication
process. However, we found the 100 percent
participation rate far offset this perception that effective communication
needs to be in person. In addition, we find that students today are quite
comfortable with communicating online, either by cell phone, text messaging, or
through social networking sites.
Allowing students to comment
on each others’ blogs may have some potential draw-backs. Students may not be as open to sharing their
thoughts and opinions if they know someone other than the professor is reading
it. Hurlburt (2008) notes that these
feelings of insecurity are usually temporary and vanish as the students get
more comfortable with the class and their peers.
One last issue: as students
link out to other sites, their posts and comments may become visible to the
public on social search engines such as Google and Technorati. Thus, it might make sense to password protect
the class blog. However, on the other
hand, if you think of blog readers as “participants in conversation,” this can
be beneficial. It has provided our
students a way to begin conversations with book authors who blog, with subject
matter experts in their fields of study, and with other interested students
outside the classroom.
Conclusion
While blogs can be useful, it
is important to note that they are just tools and not the objective
itself. They are not for everyone or for
all classes and need to be made an integral part of the course design. However, as noted by Trammell and Ferdig
(2004), the use of blogs as a learning tool seems to be low-cost with
high-returns. While more research needs to be done as to how blogs can more
effectively be used, it is a given that technology will continue to influence
learning. According to Diana Oblinger,
“Already, our focus has shifted from teaching to learning...Much of what we
have done in the past has been constrained by the prevailing conception of the
classroom, but the lecture and the lab are only two ways to learn...The next
step may be the integration of knowledge management and e-learning systems to
augment current practices” (Morrison & Oblinger, 2002, p. 3).
Our experiences in using
classroom blogs have been overwhelmingly positive. While student acceptance of
technology in the classroom requires its perceived usefulness and ease of use (Martins
& Kellermanns, 2004), students do tend to learn best when they need
information that they can put to use immediately. Blogs are an effective and efficient method
of allowing students to access information as it is needed and to make
connections between explicit knowledge from textbooks and tacit knowledge
gained as students see how others can and are using the knowledge being shared. Blogs also introduce students to online
learning communities so they can access and evaluate information, and construct
new learning paradigms for themselves.
Finally, effectively modeling ways to use blogs as a teaching and
learning tool is a useful skill for our students to have as they embark on
their journey of life-long learning.
References
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Quarterly, 8(4), 273-278.
Edbauer, J., Hogan, K.,
Hynes, C., & Rumbarger, L. (2005). Issues in
Teaching: White Paper Series #050504-2. Computer writing and research lab at
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