Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

The ability to think reflectively for meaningful learning has been one of the educational goals in schools and colleges (Dewey, 1998). Many researchers believe that only through reflection can students achieve meaningful/deep learning (e.g., Davis, 2003; Moon, 1999; Novak & Gowin, 1984). A blogging and mapping tool has been designed to scaffold the whole learning process proposed by Moon to enable more meaningful search utilization and reorganization of information. The learning process includes making sense, making meaning, and working with meaning, and thereby linking individual posts into a more holistic picture of content learning (Moon, 1999). The blog Web site resides at: http://ide.ed.psu.edu/yxx105/ublog/. The features of the tool include:
• writing blogs
• attaching up to five keywords to each blog
• using keywords to form a concept map
• archiving all versions of the concept maps for students’ and the instructor’s review

An entry-level graduate course in instructional design used this tool in their class. This course required students to evaluate, synthesize, and systematize their learning and eventually form a holistic understanding of the field of instructional design. Besides a three-hour face-to-face meeting, the class included hands-on projects, blog assignments, and a final reflection paper. Students were to write blogs at least once every week for eight weeks. Each time they blogged, students would spend about thirty minutes writing about their learning in this class. In order to facilitate the students’ reflection and learning process, the blog assignment and the final paper were carefully designed based on the findings of previous research. As the “expert system” proposed by Rosie (2000), a document with the blog assignment and final paper instructions was provided to students to guide reflection. The final paper asked students to reflect on the whole field and how their views about the field change over time. Students were required to write this final paper based on their previous blog reflections and apply 85 to 95 percent of the concepts in their final version of the concept map. In order to ensure students would build knowledge in a progressive manner, the instruction encouraged students to reorganize their concept maps every week and required them to do it at least every three weeks.