This paper discusses a study of a development that took place during the academic year 2007/2008, involving the use of blogs to support reflective dialogue within a class of pre-school student teachers. This campus course was held and administrated by teacher education at Umeå University and was a part of a national project funded by the Swedish National Agency for Networks and Co-operation in Higher Education (NSHU) project. The aim of the project is to explore the use of blended learning involving a variety of ICT tools to support such communication, e.g. digital portfolios, blogs, video papers and video conferencing. The study focuses on the type and level of reflective dialogue, internal and external, that can be observed in students’ blogging activity in relation to their own understanding of ‘reflection’. Furthermore the paper discusses students’ experiences of ICT affordances and constraints (Greeno, 1994) in relation to their experiences of reflection and dialogue in a digital learning environment. The research questions arising from this study are as follow: • How can students’ understanding of reflection be described? • What type and level of internal reflective dialogue are the students undertaking? • What type and level of external reflective dialogue are the students undertaking? • How can the students’ achievements be understood in relation to their own interpretation of ‘reflection’? • What ICT affordances and constraints do the students experience when using blogs for reflection? Reflection is described as essential to the learning process (Schön, 1991) and even if the definition of reflection varies there are some common ideas of a process consisting of awareness of a ‘problem’ that is to be critically analysed with the purpose of reaching new perspectives (Atkins & Murphy, 1993). This can be achieved through an internal dialogue by thinking or writing and also through an external dialogue and reflection together with others (Clark, 1990). Reflecting in groups to support the learning process could be described as a reflective dialogue through which all participants are responsible for reflecting him/herself and then in being actively involved in a creative process aiming at reaching new perspectives within the group. Reflective dialogues can furthermore be carried out through face-to-face seminars, video-conferences or as a written dialogue in discussions boards, process diaries (Bergström & Granberg, 2007), or reflective journals (Clarke, 2003) . The use of blogs on the Internet has increased over the last decade. There are however an increasing number of examples of teachers who have used blogs to support the students’ learning process (Chan & Ridgeway, 2006; Oravec, 2003; Wiliams & Jacobs, 2004) Even though blogs are usually used as private diaries (Herring et al., 2004) they may have the potential to support written dialogue by combining internal and external reflection. These ideas have influenced development within teacher education at Umeå University in recent years. The concept of reflection is however a complex activity as Boud and Walker (1998) highlight in their discussion of the different obstacles students perceive when they are given an assignment involving reflection. They argue that the very understanding of reflection constitutes one obstacle. As a consequence it is a complex process to determine if students have actually reflected or not and a range of methods for identifying the nature and quality of reflection have been developed. Mezirow (1991) describes how individuals learn through three level of reflection; content reflection, process, reflection and premise reflection. Using Mezirows´s transformative learning theory as basis Kreber & Cranton (2000) define ‘indicators’ of content, process and premise reflection. These indicators could be used to identify level of reflection within students’ face-to-face or written discussions.

A number of quantitative and qualitative methods are being used in order to study students’ experiences of and performance in blogging for reflection. Text analysis of student blogs is being carried out in order to examine the type and level of both internal and external reflective dialogue. , The ideas of Kreber & Cranton (2000) in terms of 'what constitutes evidence of reflection' will be used as theoretical starting point for analysis. In addition the students’ understanding of ‘reflection’ as well as their experiences of using blogs for reflective dialogue is being examined through narrative interviews and Greeno’s (1994) theory of affordances is being used as a lens to analyse students’ experiences of ICT affordances and constraints.

The expected outcomes of this study include the illumination of students’ understanding of ‘reflection’, the level of reflections through internal and external dialogue and their perceptions of their own learning. Furthermore this study will provide some insights into ICT-affordances and constraints when blogs are used to support learning through reflective dialogue.