Project Investigator(s): Robert MA Crawford, Instructor, Department of Political Science
Project Description
A sampling of undergraduate course outlines today reflects increased experimentation with new genres of writing across academic fields. Yet the large term essay remains a largely unquestioned pillar of rigorous academic writing. This project will undertake comparative analysis of student blogs and a major research essay in two political science lecture courses in an effort to demonstrate specific differences and complementarities in these genres. It will adapt past blog assignments into a series of posts designed to scaffold an eventual final paper submission, with an eye toward evaluating whether blogs can blend personal expression with well crafted, meticulous research.
Research Question
What are learners’ attitudes toward, and differences between, the use of blogging versus the traditional research paper?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
My research shows scepticism about student blogs among political scientists, even as many of these instructors blog at themselves, and a stronger inclination to use blogs in other disciplinary contexts (e.g. humanities courses like Arts One). This project seeks to build evidence-based reasons for traditionally-oriented instructors to explore the use of students blogs. The literature shows that teaching faculty may be quicker to embrace blogs than research faculty, and that experiments in new genres of scholarship run up against a relatively conservative academic value and reward system.