Documentation:Learning Platforms/Technologies/Blogs/Why Would I Use It
Why would I use
...blogs and wikis have been applied in hundreds of instances for a wide array of teaching and learning applications. Professors use blogs to make big classes feel smaller by sharing resources and news, and allow students a quick means of offering feedback or questions. Graduate students use these spaces to document research processes and to connect with peer communities from around the world. Course blogs give students a unique, personalized platform for finding their own voice and sharing it...The blog is essentially a parallel conversation to the one held in-class, facilitating tangential inquiries, commentaries and responses in a way that not only increases the calibre of class discussions, but actively contributes to an open, web-based intellectual community. - Matthew Blunderfield, Science Fiction and the City [1]
Blogging allows you to share your thoughts, views, ideas, observations and learnings via an online journal of sorts. Most blogging applications allow you to upload your own (or other shared) media files. An important feature of blogging is that (through reader comments) it allows you to build a community of people who are interested in what you write and you want you to read what they write. Blogs can come in many flavors and have many uses beyond the single author, journal type blog. It may look like a website or a portfolio. It may include many authors or just one. It can be about text or just images.
When to use a blog
Blogging can be incorporated into the classroom in many different ways. Here are some of the most common:
- Create a course blog in which you (as the instructor) blogs the content and ask students to comment on your posts before class. You can then use the blog post as a discussion starter. For instance, did someone have an insightful comment? Did you repeatedly see the same question popping up? Share these (and the blog post) to get class conversations started.
- Create a group blog for the students in your course. Via the blog, students will be able to ideas from class, share resources with one another, and draw in outside participants (if you allow them to).
- Require each student to set-up and maintain his or her own blog. This can be a great way to facilitate student journaling, with journal entries either kept private, shared with just the instructor, or shared more widely.
- Individual blogs can be used to scaffold a project or paper. For instance, Post 1 could be a list of potential topics; post 2, 2-3 primary sources on a chosen topic; post 3, a research proposal; post 4, a progress report; post 5, a draft of a section of the paper. The benefit of having students do this on a blog is that you can put them into peer editing groups and students can give one another feedback online.
- Create a course blog that serves as a ‘hub’ which aggregates individual student blogs into one centralized space. On this blog, you could also provide course information such as the syllabus, the schedule, posts about assignments, handouts, and course discussions.