Limitations

Although our findings have meaningful implications for enhancing the understanding of an individual’s blog acceptance behavior, this study has some limitations. First, because the subjects of this study were internet users and were not randomly selected from a specific population, the potential for self selected samples exists. Even though the no-response bias was not significant, the issue of sample bias may still exist. In addition, given that measurements of all structures were taken at the same time and using the same instrument, causality can only be inferred with the potential for common method variance. Finally, because of the blog features and the restrictions on research methods, some media choice factors were not taken into account.

Chapter 3.

A blog application: Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer

interaction, learning motivation, and academic achievements

3.1. Research background

Blog use in educational sectors has grown extensively in the last decade and considerable research has focused on the educational use of blogs (Oravec 2002, Williams & Jacobs 2004, Richardson 2006; Dailey 2006, Churchill 2009, Kerawalla et al. 2009, Yang 2009). Although blogs did not originate in education sectors, they have become useful in various educational levels and settings, and as an authoring tool. For example, blogs often serve as a digital portfolio of student assignments and achievements (Liu & Chang 2010). Most blog platforms provide a personal writing space, which is easy to publish, sharable, and automatically archived, empowering users to form learning communities through inter-linkages. Therefore, blogs can combine solitary reflection and peer interaction in learning processes (Richardson 2006, Yang 2009). Williams and Jacobs (2004) suggest that students learn as much from each other as they do from an instructor or a textbook - what matters is finding an appropriate vehicle for facilitating this learning. They considered blogging as potential transformational technology for teaching and learning. Oravec (2002) observed the many blog dimensions suited to the individual voices of students, empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking. The typical scenario when a teacher poses a question in a classroom is that a few dominate the discussion. Students also express their opinions without solid support from content they are studying, perhaps because there is not enough time to prepare or reflect. Disengaged students frequently remain silent and others

who might have something truly relevant to contribute, are too shy to do so. Dailey (2006) considered time as the biggest advantage of blogs. Blogging gives students the time to think.

This motivates us to investigate ways of using blogs to engage students in learning when they are not in class.

Critical reflection is the process of thinking back on prior learning to determine whether what one has learned is justified under present circumstances (Mezirow & Associate 1990).

The process of creating comments involves reflecting on prior readings of original posts authored by a peer and on other prior knowledge acquired to date. Hall and Davison (2007) investigated hundreds of blog comments in an interactive learning environment and observed a significant number of reflective comments, posting messages, and noteworthy comments leading to an inquiry that accentuated critical reflection. In particular, composing blog comments involves stepping back, reflecting, and analyzing, which enables individuals to become more thoughtful and mindful of their work. Yu et al. (2010) indicated that sharing culture is strongly linked to member knowledge sharing behavior via weblogs. Participants appreciated the opportunity to use technology to communicate with peers.

Classroom discussion is often teacher-student centered, rather than a student-student dialog.

The blog is a vehicle to ensure that everyone has a voice and is a valued member of the learning community. The instructor has previously been the only person to access student work. Students turn in their work to instructors and have no way to learn how their peers scored on the same assignments, thereby losing the potential of appreciating student work. In contrast, peer learning is a form of cooperative learning that enhances the value of student-student interaction. Students using interactive blogs can read peer postings and leave comments, which enable them to learn from peers by creating dialogues with each other (Kay 2006). Students enhance their analytical thinking while engaged in such meaningful dialogues. In this sense, blogs may have the potential to transform personal learning to

collaborative learning. This motivates us to compare and contrast the individual use of student blogs for personal e-portfolios/learning diaries with their collaborative use in the context of a wider social network.

A general awareness of blogs exists in higher education, and some students and faculty may even have maintained personal blogs for years in non-educational settings (Makri & Kynigos 2007). However, blogs in educational environments have not generated a comparable level of momentum as those in non-educational use. Some researchers (Hall and Davison, 2007) argue that our understanding of how to use social software such as discussion forums and blogs in an effective and meaningful way is minimal at best. The problem partially rests in the absence of more cohesive information to assess quality and effectiveness. Enthusiastic claims for blogging in educational settings need to focus on a comprehensive research base broadly supported by vigorous empirical studies conducted in the framework of educational theory.

Research methods such as the user survey (Williams & Jacobs 2004) and ethnography (Dailey 2006, Hall & Davison 2007, Makri & Kynigos 2007, Yang 2009) have been used to assess blogging quality and effectiveness, but the perspective differences in surveys and methodologies make it difficult to combine the results into a cohesive knowledge base that can guide practice and education (Hall & Davison 2007). This study will provide substantial insights beyond enthusiasm for educators who consider the use of blogs to improve the quality of student learning experiences. This study investigates blog technology for encouraging interactions between students, as well as its consequences in terms of attitude changes towards learning motivation, peer learning, and academic achievement.

We proposed a hypothesis testing approach to assess the effects of blogs on student attitudes towards peer learning, academic achievements, and community interaction. The hypotheses to contrast solitary and interactive use of blogs were tested through a quasi-experiment employing a repeated measures design (Rosenthal & Rosnow 1991) where

the “control group” was compromised of students participating in the solitary use of blogs, and where the “experimental group” was compromised of students participating in the interactive use of blogs. Participants were electronics majors who enrolled in two courses for two consecutive semesters from 2006 to 2007. Students used blogs when not in class.

Questionnaires were used as an instrument to collect data for quantitative analysis.

3.2. Theoretical background and hypothesis development

The traditional classroom-learning environment includes only an instructor and learners.

The instructor is responsible for delivering content, answering questions, and testing learning, while learners play a passive role. Communication of course content is mostly one-way, from the instructor to the learner. In a hybrid-learning environment, the instructor designs the classroom instruction and becomes more of a facilitator to engage learners through computer mediated communication (CMC). Technology has created opportunities for learning to become a more interactive process between instructors and learners as well as among learners.

We used the expectancy theory of Vroom (Rao 2000) as a framework to explore factors, which motivate one to contribute and collaborate in online learning environments: blogs as compared to other social tools such as discussion forums. The expectancy theory includes the three dimensions of valence, instrumentality, and expectancy when investigating choices people make. Motivation is produced by individual expectancy that a certain effort will lead to an intended performance, the instrumentality of this performance achieving a certain result, and the desirability of this result for the individual, known as valence (Condrey 1998). Blogs provide more control in configuration, content sharing, and customization than discussion forums. Diverse expectancy levels involve the efforts required that lead to the intended results in peer learning. In other words, what matters is whether the efforts will eventually lead to the

end-results. Findings in the work of Kay (2006) suggest that idea sharing and online interaction in discussion forums are significant in learning environments. Hall and Davison (2007) also provide evidence of learning effectiveness in terms of peer support, propositional stances, and group affective tones. However, blogs might be a better instrument to achieve idea sharing and collaborative learning without sacrificing too much on customizing blogging space, tuning its look and feel, and the sense of ownership (Hall & Davison 2007). In contrast, members jointly own discussion forums, administrators design their look and feel, and member-specific customization is hardly possible. With regard to valence, blogs compared to discussion forums leave more room for students to present their results in multiple forms of media other than text, a major form of media seen in discussion forums.

The content analysis of blogs (Hall & Davison 2007) reveals that interactive use of blogs with students composing comments in educational settings results in a substantial degree of online peer interaction among learners. This leads us to the following hypothesis:

H2-1: The use of the comments feature in blogs is associated with positive attitudes towards online peer interaction.

Studies have supported that “good conversations” in blogs as social media are beneficial to peer learning. Makri and Kynigos (2007) conducted a study on 48 university students assigned to publish their answers to open-ended questions and problems on the blog, make their ideas explicit and “readable” by others, and comment on the work of their peers. They analyzed excerpts of written transcripts from participant blog entries, observation notes, informal interview transcripts, and a final evaluation questionnaire. Their ethnography method identified most students in their experiments as “blog frequent visitors,” who visited blogs quite often, but did not comment or contribute to a discussion; rather, they merely

observed ongoing activities or debates. Hall and Davison (2007) conducted content analysis of 79 student blogs in a university class setting and provided an evidence base for peer support through reflective learning activities facilitated by student blogs. The students were free to interpret the instruction to be “reflective” to mean that they should challenge statements posted on peer blogs as much as possible. Based on the role model theory of Merton (Holton 2004), individuals compare themselves with reference groups of people who occupy the social role to which the individual aspires. Similarly, exposing oneself to good postings, which translate postings with reflection and insight, identifies role models in the learning context among many peers.

A behavior pattern in the blogging context involves some motivated students who perceive differences among themselves, to some students who deepen their thinking, and finally, to some accomplished students who successfully compose feedback in their comments (Chang

& Chang, in press). From the perspective of Piaget (1926), students interacting with their peers in learning situations will cause disequilibration, expose inconsistent knowledge, explore opposing perceptions and ideas, and challenge inadequate logical reasoning and strategies, resulting in higher-quality comprehension by learners. This leads us to hypothesis H2-2.

H2-2: The Use of the comments feature in blogs is associated with more motivation to learn from peers than not using the comments feature.

From the social modeling perspective (Bandura 1986), student-student interaction presents opportunities for observing and imitating successful behaviors and achievements, which essentially results in changes in peer levels of competence in a task. Peer learning is a form of cooperative learning that enhances the value of student-student interaction and results in

various advantageous learning outcomes. By opening opportunities for peers to view blogs created by others and encouraging comments and suggestions after examining their viewpoints, exemplars are exhibited for observations and modeling, which, in the light of social modeling by Bandura (1986), should enhance observer knowledge levels in a task.

Consequently, course subjects reflected in interactive blog conversation, dialogues, and comments may enhance academic achievements. Therefore, we propose our third hypothesis:

H2-3: The use of the comments feature in blogs is associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievements in course subjects.

3.3. Methods

3.3.1. Participants

Students aged 20 to 26 from two classes, namely Electronic Commerce, and Design of Internet Applications, were surveyed during the fall semester of 2006 (N=71) and the spring semester of 2007 (N=83), as to the use of blogs as a supplement to traditional classroom lectures. The students were all electronics majors with a male to female ratio greater than 5:1.

All the participants had used computers and the Internet on a day-to-day basis for at least ten years. Viewed in the cultural context, the users, similar to typical college students in Taiwan, were mostly hesitant to raise questions in classroom settings and preferred to study alone rather than sit in study groups. They also tended to consider asking questions in classrooms as an interruption to the ongoing lecture of the professor, and therefore impolite.

3.3.2. Setting

Students were required to create their own blogs as part of a regular face-to-face course that

met once a week for three hours. After each class meeting, participants were required to go online and write essays on ICT subjects such as IT off shoring and globalization, software business models in the third world, and the future of nonprofit computing. Two classes participated in the experiments. Class members enrolled in Electronic Commerce participated in the solitary use of blogs, and members in the Design of Internet Applications class participated in the interactive use of blogs. The former was called the “Solitary” Group or S-Group, and the latter was called the “Interactive” Group or I-Group. The graduate class was assigned to the I-Group that performed interactive blogging, while the undergraduate class was assigned to the S-Group that performed solitary blogging. The graduate class consisted of first-year graduates and undergraduate seniors while the undergraduate class consisted of only undergraduate seniors. The ratio of the class size was about 1:2. Participants in the I-Group were required to electively make comments or express thoughts about their peer blog postings, while participants in the S-Group were not required to do so. Blog comments were intended to be student-led, and the teacher would only intervene if there were problems that students could not resolve, such as severe controversies and emotional disputes. Individuals who were willing to report abuse of the system to the lecturer used a reporting tool. In the orientation session, students received legal and ethical advice against plagiarism and language abuse since they would be making comments in written form.

The I-group was expected to browse blog postings of their peers, and then select three of them to make verbal comments weekly. However, students were not expected to look at the work of other students. Commenting participation was worth 1/30 of the final grade, to minimize the negative impact of being graded, and yet provide incentives for making comments. The grading was based on the quality of comments, efforts made to compose the comments, and practical contextuality. Students in the S-Group could read blogs of their peers, but that was not expressly required. However, the blog system we used was able to track the

viewing history for each post in terms of page views, times pages were visited, and visitor addresses. Students in the S-group were also assigned to summarize in their own blogs what they read on the blogs of others, to further ensure they read the blogs of others.

The instructor also created a blog as a central hub for the students of both groups to be able to communicate with each other. The instructor blog was for posting course materials in the curriculum, categorizing descriptions of resources, and making announcements to class members. Students of both groups were encouraged to read the instructor blog before the class met to better prepare themselves for class activities.

3.3.3. Platform

The blog in our study is based on the platform of Blogger at http://www.blogger.com, which is now a property of Google. Although it is a commercial operation, there are no mandatory advertisements that may pop up. This quiet atmosphere is one of the reasons for its selection, because we do not like to see students distracted in the middle of a lab simply because of eye-catching advertising media. The search engine along with Blogger is Google, with which most students already feel familiar. Blogger provides a set of ready-to-use templates to choose from, and allows users to make a change later on. This personalization function increases sense of ownership. Due to vandalism arising in blogs, we adopted a built-in challenge mechanism to fight with crawler-based vandal programs to filter unwanted posts and comments.

3.3.4. Measures and data collection

With the use of the blog as a learning environment during class, the learning engagement and social networking of students enrolled in the class were of interest. Thus, at the end of

each semester, a questionnaire was used to understand student attitudes for the two groups.

Based on the suggestions of Hinkin (1998) regarding development measures for use in survey questionnaires, we invited education experts to participate in item generation. According to the three factors that we defined for the purpose of our study, online peer interaction, motivation to learn from peers, and academic achievements, a set of five items were designed for each individual factor. The questionnaire was poised by a score on a 5-point Likert scale, where 5 (Strongly Agree) represents the maximum score of the scale and 1 (Strongly Disagree) represents the minimum score. The original questionnaire included 15 questions. For each set of data collected in the survey, we checked its factor loading individually. We kept questions with loadings 0.7 or higher to confirm that independent variables identified a priori are represented by a single appropriate factor. For each of the three factors, there were five questions at the beginning, but only three remained after checking factor loadings.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis also indicated reasonable goodness-of-fit (CFI>0.9, GFI>0.9, NNFI>0.9, RMSEA<0.05). Factor loading of each remaining item showed convergent validity in the empirical data. A chi-square different test on each factor further confirmed discriminant validity of the results collected from the questionnaire. Finally, reliability analysis was used to check the dependability, consistency, and homogeneity of each item in a given factor. Cronbach’s α for all factors were all higher than 0.80 for the two consecutive semesters, satisfying the general requirement of reliability for research instruments (Hatcher 1994). See Appendix for the questionnaire.

To check the difference in samples from the two groups, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to detect the questionnaire to probe background data, including years of computer experiences to date, daily usage of computer, and experiences in web authoring.

The result of the MANOVA showed that the two groups had no statistical significance (F=2.03, p=0.14). Both groups were electronics majors with more than ten years of computer

experiences. Although the two groups were studying separate subjects, the two subjects were both technical in the electronics context, their instructor was the same, and the instruction format was similar.

In addition to investigating student attitudes toward interactive blogging through questionnaire, we were interested in the content of their comments. Using the same method as in Hall and Davison (2007), we performed content analysis by digging into student comments

In addition to investigating student attitudes toward interactive blogging through questionnaire, we were interested in the content of their comments. Using the same method as in Hall and Davison (2007), we performed content analysis by digging into student comments