The Research Project
What were students’ perspectives on blogging?
Talking points
After my final grades were submitted, I sent my former cohort of students an invitation to participate in a focus group. Five of them volunteered to participate: Monica, Sky, Keiren, and Vera, and Miley (all pseudonyms). All but Monica were in their first year of graduate studies at McGill, and all were either international students or from another province in Canada.
After the focus group, I sent a link to an anonymous survey to the whole cohort with 4 open ended question. There were 10 respondents. This was an important part of the project because I suspected that those who volunteered for the focus group would be those who really loved the blogging (I was right). Also, I wanted to give students a chance to share their opinions anonymously, and not in front of their teacher.
I did a thematic analysis of the transcription of the focus group and the survey data and found 4 prominent and interconnected themes (all extracts in the next pages are from Crump, 2018).
Reference
Crump, A. (2018). Thinning the Classroom Walls: Graduate Student Perspectives on Blogging as Pedagogy. J-BILD, 2(2), 29-52. http://bild-lida.ca/journal/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JBILD_CRUMP_2_2_2018.pdf
