The reading journal blog assessment task: public relations students’ perceptions

In 2007, a new assessment task, a reading journal blog, was introduced to undergraduate public relations courses. It was designed to address two challenges,firstly to encourage student engagement with the required set course readings to facilitate student learning and secondly to equip students with the technical skills of blogging. Reading to learn has long been a feature of higher education (Guthrie, 1982, cited in Maclellan, 1997). The first challenge was to increase students’compliance with required readings as this plays “an important role in classroom dynamics as well as individual achievement” (Burchfield & Sappington, 2000, p.59). The second challenge arose from recent academic literature in the communication discipline indicating that public relations graduates will need to be able to set up,maintain and contribute to blogs and make decisions about whether such tactics should be adopted in campaigns (Alexander, 2004; McAllister and Taylor, 2007). In this paper the context and design of the assessment task and the results of a student survey are presented. There is evidence suggesting that this type of assessment task increases student engagement with required course reading; that the assessment task could have wider application than in public relations courses and, that it facilitates the development of students’ technical skills in blogging. In presenting the research findings, suggested ways to further develop the assessment task are put forward.