Conversations, community and collegiality: Exploring the effect of blogging on teaching and learning practice

School:  USG  (Institute for Academic Development)

Team Members:  Jenny Scoles, Hazel Christie, Nina Morris, Karen Howie

Abstract

The Teaching Matters blog has become a key channel though which to showcase the many exciting initiatives around teaching and learning at The University of Edinburgh and, anecdotally, operates as an important spark for discussions that can change individuals’ practices. The range of analytics and reader statistics currently available to us, however, do not provide an adequate overview of user interaction with the blog and, if taken at face value, could suggest that it is failing to ‘have impact’. This project seeks to provide a more nuanced view, building on a preliminary study (within the IAD) that explored how and why staff and students engaged with the blog.

Using qualitative and innovative techniques, the project will:

(1) map the motivation of (UoE) staff and students to engage with Teaching Matters;

(2) explore how conversations generated by blog posts travel;

(3) examine what this engagement looks like, and how it can be evidenced as having ‘impact’; and,

(4) investigate how Teaching Matters might further support the informal sharing of excellent practices and community building.

The findings will help us to understand how better to support conversations, community building and collegiality around teaching and learning, to better identify the types of physical, intellectual and temporal spaces that can stimulate and encourage dialogue and debates on teaching and learning, enhance Teaching Matters as an online resource for teaching and learning, and provide a valuable contribution to the literature on blogging as a means of developing informal professional communities and dialogue in education.