Innovatieregelingen 2011

In the academic year 2010/11, I integrated a student blog into my MA course on ‘European Integration and Civil Society’ for the first time: http://www.fasos.org/civilsociety1011. This was a rather exciting experiment, because neither the students nor I were entirely sure how the Blog would function in the traditional curriculum. My course usually focuses on the role of civil society in EU policy, but following the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) early in 2011, I decided to shift the emphasis of the course on the role of civil society to bring about peaceful change and democratic reform to a region which had hitherto been subjected to heavy-handed authoritarian rule. One of the most interesting aspects of the recent popular revolts in the MENA was (and is) the role and use of social media in the protest movement.

Having shifted the focus of my course to a topic which was intensively debated in the media at the time, it seemed appropriate to create a learning and debating platform for my students, which would allow them to quickly exchange the ‘latest news’ and facts on the Arab uprisings during our course, and to communicate and discuss beyond the time/place constraints of the course schedule.

Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 2011 (Die Zeit Online, © Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The students (and I) received an extensive training in ‘How to write a Blog’ by the SURF project manager Sjoerd Stoffels at the start of the course. I then asked my students which themes they wanted to discuss on the Blog. In the end, we settled with three key themes, to which every student had to contribute. In addition, students had to contribute a minimum of 1500 words to the Blog as a whole. At the end of the course, the students’ contributions to the Blog were graded based on their relevance, quality, factual/stylistic clarity and originality (the Blog grade constituted 30% of the overall grade for the course). In addition to posting comments on the Blog, the students were also able to integrate multimedia into their Blog, as well as Twitter messages.

Getting on with it: How Osama Bin Laden took over the Student Blog

My students initially made rather careful (and timid) contributions to the Blog, and stuck to the ‘official’ requirement to produce a Blog post here and there, twitter the odd message to the Blog and complete the 1500 words. Then something extraordinary happened. One week into the course, the news appeared that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. When I screened the Blog that evening, the discussions on the Blog had quadrupled, and I watched with amazement how my students kept on discussing/twittering until very late that night. And not only did the quantity of contributions increase that night, the quality and sophistication of the Blog posts was remarkable. I read through all the Blog posts prior to our next tutorial, and had a formidable base for structuring our discussions in the tutorial and link the various discussion threads on the Blog to the course literature. The pattern continued until the end of the course: The students raised very important issues in their Blog discussion, which we then placed into the context of our literature in the following tutorial.

Help? The Student Blog was growing out of proportion

Student post: Campaign poster by Saudi-Arabian women's organisation

Surprised by the sheer amount of contributions to the Blog (after all, almost 20 students actively participated to the Blog day and night), we all started to feel overwhelmed by the Blog. Several students mentioned that they struggled to keep up with each and every Blog post and we defined a strategy to keep the discussions manageable. I ensured students that it was not necessary to follow all the Blog posts, and to remember that a few excellent contributions to some of the discussion threads would be sufficient for a good grade. I also moved the deadline for the end of the discussions on the Blog forward to allow students to focus all their attention to completing the final assignment during the last week of the course. This reassured the students, though some just could not stop: Although I made it clear that I was only including Blog contributions into the grading that had been posted before the deadline, the discussions continued for several months after the end of my course!

The Statistics

The students contributed to the Blog for approximately three weeks. During that time, my students created approx. 100 posts and posted over 120 comments and 70 Twitter messages to the Blog. The Blog generated approx. 1500 reads so far, including from Brazil, Japan, Ukraine and the Russian Federation.

Will we have another Blog in the academic year 2011/12?

My answer is: YES, of course! My MA students usually come from many different countries and bring a wealth of diverse knowledge and opinions to the classroom. They all access different media and the Blog has enabled them to share these instantly and thereby enrich the discussions on the Blog as much as the ensuing discussions in the classroom. The Blog also made the course more interesting, and students were more enthusiastic about their course work in general. The Blog also functioned as a very useful and alternative tool to assess the students’ knowledge and skills. It required that students process vast amounts of online information, then relate that information to the broader academic literature and finally write precise and targeted Blog posts weaving together web-content and academic literature in a very short amount of time. This is very different to the ‘usual’ academic writing at university or the ‘usual’ discussions in the classroom for which students have plenty preparation time. More information does not necessarily equal more knowledge: What matters is how information is selected, verified, processed and placed into context. The generation of my students is exposed to vaster and vaster amounts of information. At university, we have always tried to equip our students with the knowledge and skills to process information and place it into a broader (and critical) context. A very good way to link the traditional task of our work at university  to the information challenges facing today’s generation of students is to integrate Blogs into the course work. Just a few days ago, a student of mine who participated in the Civil Society course asked me to write a reference letter for him. He wanted to apply for a job with a leading European media outlet: experience in creating and maintaining a WordPress Blog was one of the main criteria.

Dr Giselle Bosse – Maastricht University

Tags: blogging, interactie, Maastricht University, Master European Studies, Twitter