I’ve been reflecting more on the NECC conference in New Orleans recently where I attended a workshop given by Bernie Dodge from Sandiego State University, well known for his work in the development of ‘webquests’. (Bernie will be presenting a workshop in webquests at the Navcon conference in Christchurch later this year)

Bernie’s session was titled “Blogs and Wikis as Webquest Tasks”. This link is worth taking a look at – there are several links from the page which illustrate how Bernie has been using blogs and wikis in his teaching, and some thoughts about the developing pedagogy behind this.

I also attended a round-table session run by Bernie and a colleague, Philip Molebash, titled “When Teachers Blog” (available here as a downloadable pdf). Bernie and Philip’s paper describes their experiences across two semesters of having students maintain a blog as a personal journal as part of their course in teaching English. I must admit I was a bit disappointed in this session – seemed that the rationale for using the blogs was a bit “thin” (why would you expect students to keep a journal online when we’ve not been successful in doing it to any great extent on paper??) – and the statistical representation of the research also left me unconvinced given the low sample rate. I’d be interested to hear what others think having read his paper.