Peer Learning and Support with Blogs

Peer learning and support with blogs

Lud Allen

Blogging for discussion, peer support and networking

The context of the course that I teach is a Sexual Health course. It’s a course that’s for Youth Workers, Peer Educators, Community Health Workers and sometimes just people from the community who are interested in sexual health. It’s about teaching the sexual health needs of young people at risk, to a wider audience. So the context is actually trying to get information out to the people who are going to be working with young people or who are young people themselves. In terms of the way the delivery works is that it is generally a blended course so there may be two days face-to-face and then three weeks off with no face-to-face and then two more days, then three weeks and then two more days.

Mostly I use a blog as part of the online component of the course, and the way I got started with that was in a programme through LearnScope in South Australia, and my work had been trying to reach people in a wider context than we had been able to do in a face-to-face situation, and not just in teaching and learning but also in a way of collaborating and sharing knowledge. I chose a blog as a solution because it suits my style. So to start with it was just something I would put up as information and I would ask people to comment on it. It’s grown a little bit since then and its actually pointed us into several directions, blogs, wikis, online classrooms, a whole range of things we are exploring.

As an example of how we use the blog in the course, is that, in the teaching and learning process we will be talking a lot about a range of sexual health issues but there isn’t time to explore that in a lot of depth, with how people feel about it, how they think they can integrate those sorts of things into their work or what it means to their everyday life. So, students are asked, they are not forced. It’s not part of their assessment. They are asked to at least look at the blog, and then we can make comments later when we meet up again, or they are asked to make comments on the blog – and the way they are asked to make comments is that … let’s say I put a YouTube video up there about young girls’ self-esteem. I may ask people to watch that then in our Moodle classroom which is online, to spell out some of their reflections about what that meant to them. We might ask people to view videos or look at articles, or just make comments on general things that are happening around them, and we will translate what they are seeing on the blog into a forum-type situation in our Moodle classroom.

The biggest advantage of using the blog in our classroom situation is that, because we don’t get to see each other a lot it’s really a fantastic tool for ensuring that people are still thinking and learning about the issues that we talk about. For instance, we may be working with students that are 500 kms away that come down for some face-to-face bit but then are feeling quite isolated when they are away from us and they’re the ones that I’m finding are using the blog and then transferring this to some sort of forum discussion, more than the others. The people that are living within the local metropolitan area will often access the blog and they’ll be saying ‘we found this really interesting’ but they won’t necessarily make comments. So the ones that are really using it more for their own learning outside of our classroom are those that are more isolated. If students are supporting each other it often depends on the group but there are some groups that will just maintain educational support, networking support. They’ll start saying ‘I’ve been noticing when I work with this young person that they are showing ‘this’ – what should I do about it?’ So they are informing each other and there are some groups that will maintain that well beyond their study within the course and have done that as professionals as they start working as well. So, some get engaged that way and some don’t.

In terms of developing the blog, it’s really quite interesting. It didn’t come strictly out of a classroom situation. We used to have a network newsletter for people that had done the course that I teach and that newsletter was by email. That then evolved into a PDF with cartoons and links to other sites then as we learned more about blogs, it became clear that people wanted access to something all the time and immediately it was regularly updated. It’s evolved already from just a straight email information to email newsletter, to a PDF format and now to the blog. For us, the natural movement from this is to develop this into something that is much more interactive. Until recently, I hadn’t realised that I could give administration rights to other people. So instead of using a forum we are hoping to turn this blog into a forum-type situation. To do that, we are actually planning on getting people from more rural and isolated areas to be part of the administrators. We are not sure exactly how that will go but the question with current students and past students is that, they are really wanting some sort of continuous interaction about ideas, comments, that sort of stuff to keep informing each other.

Building a learning network over time and place

The blog is always up there. That’s the beauty of the blog that it evolved from one group to another and so for instance, topics that may particularly interest one group aren’t necessarily going to be the same things that interest another group. As an example, we have got a group that is really into … currently around the world there is a whole debate about ‘does abstaining from sex actually make young people safer in terms of STIs or teen pregnancy’ and that sort of thing. We’ve got a group that currently is quite interested in that so we can have lots of that stuff up on the blog at the moment. What we are finding, of course, is that other people that are being informed by the debate will also start accessing this sort of stuff and making comments about it as well.

We have an open blog because – what we wanted to do was, we wanted to see what sort of groups – not just locally but around the world – would be interested in sexual health issues and to see if we will actually attract other people just by their searches and the tags into the issues that we’ve got – because we realise that, while we can inform each other on a local level, it doesn’t necessarily inform us on things that are happening globally. As an example, we will teach about, say HIV within a sexual health course and what that might mean for young people at risk in Australia, but there certainly are some links that can be drawn between young people at risk in Australia and young people at risk in other parts of the world. We are hoping to eventually have a much larger group that is commenting on the issues within the blog and it also gives students a chance to see a much wider connection than just their own. What we’ve talked about is turning that then, into maybe two blogs – one that is specifically for students and one that is a more open-debating informing-type blog.

One of the other really important things about this blog is that it is providing resources for students and for workers to use as well and I don’t just necessarily mean the resources that people might get out of a course, but for instance, there is an organisation Family Health International that provides free resources to third-world countries about family planning and what are the most effective methods of family planning – the term they use – and particularly, like for our indigenous communities, the links are really similar and so people that are indigenous students or indigenous students working in communities, might be able to access this stuff and get free resources that they can take and use immediately within their area of expertise, I guess.

Facilitating student interaction and ownership

In terms of managing the blog, it’s a blog that is open to anybody – it’s not locked, its not password-ed, so anybody can log on and access the blog. In terms of moderating or supporting students, if a comment is posted and I don’t make a response very quickly then the feedback I’ve got from the students is ‘don’t you care about what I’m saying? You’ve asked us to access this and I don’t see you supporting me in that’ – so I make sure that any time there is a comment I will immediately get onto there and make a comment in reply.

The other thing that has been asked for – and this is something that is going to happen into the future – is that people have asked for their own administration rights to the blog as well, so they can add instead of necessarily going to a forum which is very much classroom-based for the students that are doing their classes at the time. There are people that have asked to have administration rights to the blog that have finished the course and want to keep the social networking going that is in there, so that’s the plan for the future. Generally, as long as they have access to the blog then I don’t need to manage that much. What I do as well though when I realised that its not been accessed very often is that I will send an old-fashioned email out to the group saying ‘can someone please get on the blog and make some sort of comment so that we can engage each other again’. I do need to prompt occasionally but I certainly need to monitor what’s happening all the time to give them the feedback that they want.

Supporting students to learn the tools

Students come with, of course, a wide range of skills and interest in not just the face-to-face learning – we’ve got the subject material that interests them and do they want to use E-learning or not – and what we do with our students is that we do check to see what access people have, what their recent past history has been in terms of either blogging or MySpace or whatever. Again because it’s not a formal part of their assessment it’s kept very low-key. I will run through in the course exactly how to use our Moodle classroom and our blog but again its always up to people to make the decision themselves if they want to partake of that part of it. I always make myself available at any time to come out either to their workplace or to meet online or phone up – whatever way suits the students in the course then I’ll make time if they are not comfortable to try and spend maybe several hours with someone trying to get them to feel comfortable in doing something. Generally, as you would expect younger people go ‘hey I know how to do it – I don’t want you telling me what to do’ and there are generally some older people that go ‘I don’t even want to push a button on a keyboard’. Everybody needs support in some way and we will try and provide that support.

I like a blog myself and that’s why I’m using it. I think as a facilitator you are really going to have to like the format, the tool that you choose. For instance, I’m not really good with wikis and so I don’t particularly use wikis even though some students have come in and said ‘we could be doing this’ and so I’m sticking with what I really like and what I’ve learned to know quite well, but I think it also means that I’m in danger of getting stuck so I’m practising in those other formats in other forms that aren’t really affecting the students that I’m working with.