A metric of Social Learning in blogs for higher education

• Yao-Jen Chang, Yao-Sheng Chang, Shu-Yu Hsu, Chiu-Hui Chen, Social Network Analysis to Blog-based Online Community, presented in International Conference on Convergence Information Technology 2007, Gyeongju, Korea. November 21~23, 2007. (EI)

Although the use of blogs has grown extensively in the past 5 years, our understanding of how to use blogs in an effective and meaningful way is still limited. In particular, acquiring more cohesive and useful information on the use of blogs is partially dependent on developing a consistent, comprehensive, theory-driven metric to assess quality and effectiveness. Considerable research has been carried out on the educational use of blogs. However, the use of blogs in education or knowledge management is more or less experimental and its effectiveness is far from clear. Research methods such as user survey and ethnography have been used in assessment but the perspective differences in surveys and methodological differences make it difficult to combine the results into a cohesive base of knowledge that can guide practice and education. Therefore, it is argued that a more comprehensive, theory-driven assessment tool is needed to advance our understanding of how to best use blogs in education. The purpose of this study, then, was to research, develop and test a multicomponent, theoretically driven metric to assess the effectiveness of blogs.

Method
Sample
The sample tested consisted of 36 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory computer science course at a university in a metropolitan area. The students, mostly males with 5 females, ranging from sophomores to seniors. The data were collected and analyzed a month after the students finished the course.

Procedure
The blogs were part of a regular face-to-face course that met once a week for 180 minutes. Participation in social learning was worth 1/30 of the final grade, to minimize the negative impact of being graded yet provide incentives to become involved in the social learning through blogs. The blogs were intended to be student-led, and the teacher would only intervene if there were problems that students could not resolve, such as severe controversies and name calling.