Using Student-Generated Blogs to Create a Global Perspective on Climate Change

ABSTRACT

Each student in an introductory college course, Global Climate Change, spends the semester blogging about a country's climate, contribution to global warming through carbon emissions, impacts of climate change, plans to adapt to their changing climate, and attempts to mitigate the problem. Students read and comment on each other's blogs throughout the semester, instilling a global perspective through the use of student-generated content. While the first half of the course focuses on the science of climate change, these blogs supplement course content for the second half of the class and feed class discussions. Students were surveyed before and after the course. When comparing students entering the course to an American population, students were more open minded and more interested in learning about global warming. At the end of the course, students showed significant gains in their knowledge of global warming, but they also gained an increase in perception that people in developing countries would be harmed by global warming. This indicates significant gains in global perspective. Students enjoyed the blogging project, gained computer and science skills, such as with spreadsheet and graph-making software, and believe it helped to change their worldview and awareness of this global issue.

Key words::

• climate change
• global warming
• blog
• student-generated content
• undergraduate
• college
• global diversity
• introductory course

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge Virginia McCarver and Kim Trenbath. We acknowledge the students of MTR 1600 in spring 2013 for their participation.