Patterns of writing, reflecting and sharing in course blog community and social networks of university students
Abstract: This paper is a report on the findings of a study conducted on an undergraduate level university course. The students was asked to write short blogposts freely about interesting topics from a wider cultural subject and reflect to each other in various forms at an open blog based shared space, which was also embedded into their closed online social network and into their open microcontent sharing network. Findings indicate, that students wrote and reflected to each others actively, they used various sources from their personal learning networks for writing, however they followed the guidelines of the instructor. The composed writings functioned as knowledge mediating shared objects, which was discussed by the students in the open blog. Counting students' portfolio contributions, which was based on their blogposts, reflections, online sharings was helpful to students to monitoring their progress and this motivated them to come back to the blog to reflect to their peers.