Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium

Barbara Ganley, a lecturer at Middlebury College, was a reluctant user of technology until she discovered the "transformative" medium of blogging in the classroom. Her exceedingly well-written article, Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom, examines her entry into the world of blogging and the power of social software as tool of learning.

Using her own experiences with her Irish literature and film class, Ganley demonstrates how weblogs "can accelerate and expand the process of experimentation and collaboration that ordinarily has little place in the liberal arts classroom." She points out how blogs create a community of learners and a kind of collective intelligence that extends out of the classroom (with links to new resources and materials) and also enhances in-class discussions. While she worried the blogs would be glib and superficial, by integrating them into the course design she found them to be the opposite. She makes a strong argument that blogging can produce a truly dynamic learning environment where students are "at once the actor and the reflector, the commentator and the instigator."