Science Ed Blog
Blogging in science and science education, Kaye Placing, Mary-Helen Ward, Mary Peat and Pedro Telleria Teixeira,
This article was a poster session for the UniServe Science Blended Learning Symposium. It looked specifically at blogging in science education. It found that there were not good examples of science education blogs out there. I included this article as it was one of the view focused exclusively on blogging in science ed. It did tend to be for Higher Ed, but still made some interesting points.
It asked the question of Why blogs?
- anyone with access can publish—no need to purchase server space or know coding
- the possibility of feedback is extremely important
- blogs allow for interactive experiences based on visual sitmultion and multi-directional paths
- Does say as explicitly but mentions throughout the aspect of the keeping of history and sustained conversation
It suggested some of the ways that blogs are used in education. For example:
In education team blogs seem to be the preferred method. “Edublogs promote student autonomy and provide students with the opportunity to interact with peers as wella s experts.” P 161
As we are tying blogs to a more constructivist approach, I thought this was a good quote as well:
“blogs have obvious advantages in a constructivist environment, and they provide a more democratic approach to student learning.” P. 163
blogging about blogging 
I’m missing it’s connection to science and science ed. Did they make any reference to why blogs might be especially valuable or useful or appropriate for a science education classroom?
Let’s see – how would I answer that?
Blogging in Science Education:
* Implications for teaching the nature of science (personal mixed with professional, local combined with global, historically and culturally grounded, tentative, social construction of meaning-making)
* Science is very visually compelling – the multi-modality of blogs would lend itself to model construction for communication and analysis
* The public nature of blogs including the immediacy (claiming intellectual property) and accountability (ideas have to have merit in the eyes of the readers/audience) might encourage/afford a different type of interaction across classroom and build communities of learners that extend beyond a particular class – spanning generations, locations, expertise, etc.
*A-
| Posted 16 years, 10 months agoThey gave a few examples of science blogs that could be used for education. Primarily they found that almost no examples exist. They proposed the need for an exploration into appropriate, long lasting blogs in science education through their own blog: http://scienced.blogspot.com
| Posted 16 years, 10 months agoIt is fairly interesting that even this blog whose purpose it was to keep the conversation going, fizzled out less than a year into its existence. (Last post 9/2005)