Blogs demystified

How autism practitioners responded to scaffolded online learning

Abstract

This paper reports on a postgraduate case study investigating the learning benefits and issues associated with the adoption of blogs in a unit where they were not normally available within the University’s version of the learning management system (WebCT). Of interest were various scaffolds designed to assist novice bloggers to reflect on their experiences of teaching children with autism using an approach called TEACCH. Interview data suggested that the ICT requirements enhanced the bloggers capacity to develop insights into their autism teaching. Structured blogging (“reflect-describe- analyse”) was particularly useful. Practitioners were equivocal as to whether blogs should be initially linked to a familiar site such as WebCT, but agreed they needed to be given guidelines about how much and how often to blog. The practitioners interpreted “scaffolding” broadly to include their colleagues’ blogs, and felt the closed membership structure facilitated the exchange of useful, albeit sensitive, information.