Blogging, Journaling and Reflective Writing: A Snapshot of Students' Preferences and Perceptions from Two Australian Universities

Abstract

This paper investigates the pedagogical benefits and challenges of using blogs as well as journals in assessing reflective writing in Clinical Legal Education learning.Recognising that millennial students have diverse learning preferences, the authors administered a survey to explore student preferences for different styles of reflective activity, contrasting peer to peer blogging with student to teacher journaling. Our findings suggest that some of the traditional ideas about privacy and self-disclosure in reflective writing are not of significant concern to students, who see benefit in sharing experiences with each other as part of a learning community. However, our findings also indicate that the opportunity of private reflection with a teacher is valued by students as part of the reflective learning experience.This paper outlines the approach to blogging adopted in our teaching practices and concludes that there are many benefits to thoughtfully designed blogging in Clinical Legal Education reflective exercises. Designers of reflective writing assessment will find this paper a useful source of related literature and ideas for developing journaling and blogging for reflective learning.