Using a Blog as a learning aid

One thing I have been doing this summer is to put up some regular blog posts for Fine Art drawing students. This is another activity that might come to an end when I retire, but I may find that it is a useful outlet for my thoughts on my own drawing.

I’m still not convinced as to how useful or effective blogs are as learning tools but for certain students I know they can be very useful. My experience is that initially building up blog posts is time consuming and not very rewarding. Very few students will look at posts regularly and those few that do then expect a new one almost everyday. However once the blog has been in place for a while there will be built up a solid repository of information and this is when it starts to become useful.

Because students will have a wide variety of interests and approaches to their subject it is understandable that the resource wont be of much interest initially, but once it is there, and if you add posts on a reasonably regular basis, you will find students start to mention interests to you when you are on the studio floor. Because you have put the posts up you will remember which subjects you have covered and will be able to direct students to particular posts that may support their ideas or interests. What I did find with an earlier blog I built up when I spent two years working with Digital Media students, was that in particular it was used quite extensively when students were planning for or writing essays or preparing for their dissertations. The blog became an area that allowed them to dip their toes into theory without having to read dense texts. The other thing about blogs is the serendipity of the posts. By their very nature blog posts tend to be idiosyncratic and come out of random experiences, therefore they feel as if life itself is driving the interest, rather than a pre-determined curriculum and this is perhaps the most important pedagogic lesson.

Students have fed back to me that what they like is the totally unexpected range of posts, the only thing holding them together being that every post has something to do with drawing. However the feedback is nearly always verbal, students, (except for the very confident) don’t like making comments that everybody else can see, even though this is an age of Facebook, ‘Friends’ on that platform are not the same as ‘Followers’ of Blog posts. However, what I have found is that when reading student essays, my posts have been cited quite often.  Perhaps the most useful post I have ever put up was one on Semiotics that I produced when I was still teaching on the DFGA Programme, find it here, DGFA BLOG because it was my last post I had tried to leave the students with a comprehensive resource and not only did that year’s students use it, I found students from not just DFGA but Fine Art, referring to it for several years afterwards.  I put the post up after an introductory class based session and as it was my last class, thought I’d better not take it for granted that the students had understood the set task.

I’ve also used a blog as an idea generator, putting up posts on a regular basis when I belonged to a college reading group, CLICK the posts were eventually rewritten as a series of poetic statements and collected together as a book that I then went on to illustrate. THE PHANTOM OF CAPITAL

The present Drawing Blog is here: http://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.co.uk and I’m expecting to finally begin to get some use from it during this coming academic term. (I only started it during the latter half of last year), which is why I have tried to feed it during the holidays. Hopefully it will also act as a gentle reminder of what students could be thinking about during the summer or as a basic reminder of what they are coming back to.

One final thought, blogs are sort of like a diary and they record interests as they grow and fade away. As they build up over time they do become very useful as a repository of all those stray ideas and thoughts that you might have had during the course of working with a body of students. It is amazing how quickly you can forget, (or at least I’m amazed at how quickly I forget) what happened and what was useful and what was not. Revisiting a blog after a while can be very rewarding.