I'm Alyce McGovern.
I'm a senior lecturer in criminology in the School of Social Sciences and I've been using
blogs for the last few years in my elective Crime, Politics and the Media as a way of
engaging students more with the class materials.
The elective that I run is called Crime, Politics and the Media, and the idea of the course
is that it's to get students to think critically about the way in which the media influences
or is involved in our understandings of crime and law and order issues.
What I'm getting students to do in that particular course is think about the way in which crime
is represented in various forms of media, and getting them to think about how that impacts
on perhaps public policy, public perceptions of law and order issues, and what the implications
of that influence might be.
I actually started using the blogs the very first time I taught this course, and I had
come from another university where we had engaged quite a lot with technology, and I
thought this course particularly lent itself towards the use of online technologies and
forms of media because we were looking critically at media processes.
I thought that I would be able to engage students more actively in the course if I was getting
them to do something that would enable them to reflect on what they were seeing, hearing
and reading in the media.
And I thought the blog would be a new way of I guess doing like a reflective journal
but in an online format that would enable them to engage with each other and what one
another were saying.
In the setting up of the task there was actually a lot of preparation involved.
The idea sounded really good to begin with, but then I found quite quickly that not many
people were using blogs.
I had to investigate what would be the best way of doing this for an assessment and how
I should actually be explaining the task to students who may never have used a blog, might
be scared of using technologies, and are so used to writing essays that this was something
quite different from what they would typically be doing.
I realised quite quickly that the initial set-up was going to be where I needed to put
a lot of energy into to make sure that I was covering all bases, making sure that any of
the concerns of students might be, I guess, considered.
That involved thinking about what platform I was going to use, what sort of information
students needed to be able to set up the blogs.
And what I actually wanted them to do in that task.
So I had to think carefully about the technology call side as well as the pedagogical side
of things.
I have had a few iterations of the task.
What I found most effective is me setting up blog sites for them.
For the last few years I've been using Blogger as a way of doing that.
And adding students to groups within that Blogger site and getting them to work as individuals
but within a group setting so that then they could start adding content from the beginning
of the semester.
The students were in groups of about five or six and within that group they had to think
about the overall design of the blog and the layout, but in terms of individual content
they produce their own content.
What they had to do for the task itself was to reflect on current media issues relating
to crime with relation to theories and concepts that we've spoken about in class.
The idea was that they would, say, read the newspapers and pick out a story that was related
to crime and then reflect on how that story might demonstrate theories or concepts that
we had spoken about.
What I made sure I did at the end of the first semester and I've been doing subsequently
is asking students to reflect on what they actually got out of the task.
A number of really interesting things came out of it.
Firstly, that they actually enjoyed it, which was important for me.
Obviously I enjoyed reading what they came up with as well.
Secondly was they actually felt like they were understanding the concepts and issues
that we spoke about in class more clearly, because they were able to apply those concepts
to everyday current news events.
So they could see the relevance of what we were talking about and the applicability to
what was going on in the media.
They also were more engaged in the classroom setting.
I saw it and they certainly felt that the tutorials that were running were related closely
to the materials that I set for them and the lectures that we held.
And, again, they actually did the readings and came to class, which is always a benefit
for me.