I had posted quite a while back that Bart and I had conducted a small study at the end of last semester related to the use of the class blog in my IST 110 course. We’re getting our results together and I wanted to share a few things with you about it. The slide images are a little small, but you should be able to see what is going on. If you want more information, feel free to contact me directly, or leave comments. I’m not going to comment on these yet … I think they speak for temselves.

We received 37 total responses for this out of a class of 42. One thing to note was that I posted a considerable amount of content on the class blog (several posts per week) and students were only asked to respond to a single, graded Discussion Activity every week. They decided if they wanted to comment on my general posts.

The first image shows students’ reactions to blogs vs. message boards as educational tools. The second image shows students’ reactions to the fact that comments are fully visible without a need to navigate a message board hierarchy to read other posts and if that helps them organize their thoughts prior to posting. The final image shows their reaction to the motivational impact of seeing other posts had on them.

Seems like an interesting start to this … lots more stuff to plow through, but it is coming together nicely. I will continue to post updates.