Blogs, Weblogs, Audio Blogs, Video Blogs, Journals
What are they?
A weblog (or blog) can mean any authored content with an underlying chronological basis that is published on the Worldwide Web. At its simplest it is just an online journal that allows other people to comment on your entries. The content may be about any topic and consist of any media, including audio, images and video, At present the majority of blogs are largely text-based. However, audio and video blogs are also available, and these may be particularly suitable for students who have visual problems or difficulty with writing. The blog can be “owned” (i.e. authored) by more than one person. Owners are responsible for maintaining their blogs.
The Educause Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About... series contains useful guides to ordinary blogs and video blogs(PDF).Common Craft have created a light-hearted animated introduction to Blogs (audio required).
How can I use them with my students?
Blogging is a very easy and useful way to maintain a record of investigative activity; for students’ project work, it can cover thoughts and ideas, notes following meetings, further reflections and so on. It also is ideal for a research diary or for writing up a conference, providing content that can be written up later on for more formal documentation.
The ability for others to comment on a blog means that the teacher can provide the student with support and feedback directly in the blogging environment. Blogs can even be the object of peer assessment activities, where students comment on, and rate, each other’s reflections according to criteria set by the teacher.
The only obvious drawback is that blogging on freely available tools is an inherently public activity, and so are unsuitable for private or confidential material. However, some blogging tools (e.g. those included in VLEs) do allow users and/or teachers to restrict access to individual blogs.
Examples
- Blogging to support e-Portfolios, Tutor link-blogging and Documenting Project Activity case studies from Ravensbourne.
- Using blogs to encourage reflective learning in history: report of a project at the University of Edinburgh.
- Just do it...blog it: an article from Guardian Online in 2005 outlining the across-the-board use of blogs at Warwick University, where every student is encouraged to keep their own blog. Pitfalls as well as benefits are covered.
- The following outputs from the D4L Programme all incorporate the use of blogs.
Where can I get one?
Some VLEs, such as Moodle, incorporate their own blogging tools. The advantage of these is that access to students’ blogs can be restricted to the student him/herself and, optionally, the teacher and/or the rest of the class.
Otherwise, to start blogging you first need to find somewhere that will host your blog: i.e. a blog server. Fortunately, it’s easy to experiment with blogging by using one of the many public services. A popular choice is Blogger. If you’re blogging in a group, then you can each have either individual or a shared blog. For a project team, Blogger provides “Team Blogs.” Once you have started blogging then use a syndicated newsfeed reader, such as the Bloglines service, to subscribe to a feed (or channel).
You can find a list of blog providers on the Website of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.
