Students Blog about History : Teaching, Literacy and Historical Consciousness in a New Media Environment

The purpose of this thesis is to study the literacy formed when a class blog is used as a tool for students studying history and explore how this particular literacy is used to generate historical knowledge. The study was conducted during the course of a project in which ninth-grade students contributed entries to a common blog in the form of a diary written by individuals who experienced the Second World War. Its three major objectives were to study the students' perception of the blog in relation to their gender and level of historical knowledge; how they and their teacher esta-blished and used the formed literacy; and how the students related to this in the production of historical knowledge. In analyzing the results, a concept of literacy was used based on seven writing practices all linked to the new medium and history education. The study was based on a questionnaire, interviews and various student texts. In order to perform a content analysis on the study results a theoretical frame­work for historical conscious-ness was included. The results show that in using the writing practices a literacy character­ized by colla-borative authorship was formed. The study concludes that this affects both what and how the students learn. Together they show each other that history is comprised of many small stories, not necessarily strictly co­herent with the general history as told by their textbooks. Examining the students’ blog entries made a new learning process visible that enabled the enhancement of their historical consciousness. Under senare år har sociala medier introducerats i undervisningen som verktyg för lärande, men hur interagerar dessa nya möjligheter till kommunikation och sam-arbete med en formell undervisningssituation i historia? I Högstadieungdomar skriver historia på bloggenbeskriver och undersöker Cecilia Johansson ett möte mellan sociala medier och historieundervisningen när högstadieelever skriver inlägg i form av dagboksanteckningar från Andra Världskriget på en klassblogg. Det kollaborativa författarskap som många elever uppvisar tycks ha påverkat både hur och vad eleverna lär sig. Dessutom synliggörs en lärprocess där ett historie-medvetande ges förutsättningar att utvecklas.