Blogging the World


What sort of impact might social software have on the study abroad experience? Does collaborative blogging between students scattered about the world enhance the educational value of travel? Might blogging for a global audience create opportunities for effective reflection and for contextualizing the immersive experience of living and studying away from the home institution? These are some of the questions explored through Blogging the World Pilot Project, which was launched during the 2005/2006 academic year and is effectively taking place today.

As a collaborative conference, Blogging the World typically involves some twenty students (five-six each from Middlebury College, Haverford College, and Dickinson College) and three faculty members who formed a pilot group exploring collaborative and individual blogging during study abroad. As strangers to each other before the initiative began, student participants tried out the effects of an online community on their educational experience away from their home and school communities.

Each student keeps an individual blog on which they post frequently about their lives abroad, including written reflections, narratives, observations and analysis; photos; podcasts and audio files; and/or multimedia inventions like digital stories and photo essays. Reader comments and discussion are encouraged, as are links to other social software tools, like Flickr. The collaborative Motherblog serves as the portal to the individual blogs (each student's most recent posts will be fed automatically onto the sidebar of the Motherblog) as well as a space for general and/or comparative discussions. The students (and the professors from their home institutions) post entries to the Motherblog designed to spark rich dialogue among themselves and with interested readers.

In the past three years there have been many successful blogs, including one student whose blog inspired her to write a full year research based thesis on Environmentalism in Germany and another who shared her journals on a panel with her professor at an Educause Learning Initiative Conference. Her blog, which captures her experience in Siberia, is a reading requirement for students at the University of Texas who are about to embark on their own journeys abroad.

An Interview with Middlebury Writing Professor Barbara Ganley on Blogging the World

Blogging the World Participant Milena Flament comments on the benefits of blogging while abroad