Blogging geographies

Abstract

This paper responds to the call for research on the use of new information technologies in higher education contexts. This was done through a case study on the use of blogs in an advanced seminar class. The paper argues that the use of blogs provided a way of gauging how students were coming to terms with the course material and how they were engaging with the course texts. Intertextuality was used as a method of understanding how students engaged with the course. The analysis was based on blog postings, student comments, course evaluations and the instructor's reflective journal.

Keywords::

• information technologies
• blogs
• intertextuality

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the students who agreed to participate in this project, and to three anonymous referees who helped enormously in clarifying our arguments.

Notes

^1. This research project was conceptualized by the first author who asked the instructor (the second author) for permission to use his blog as a source of data. The focus of the research was on academic writing and blog genres. However, once the data were collected, it became clear that the relationship between the blogs and content learning was significant. The changing patterns of learning over the Cohort 1 (Winter 2010) data were significant enough that the first author asked the second author to participate in this paper as the subject specialist. We have continued to use the third person, because the project was not conceptualized as a reflective self-study.