EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5
Educational Blogging
The Web is by now a familiar piece of the educational landscape, and for those sites where personal publishing or chronologically ordered content would be useful, blogs have stepped to the fore. Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell identifies five major uses for blogs in education.
First, teachers use blogs to replace the standard class Web page. Instructors post class times and rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings, and exercises. Aside from the ordering of material by date, students would find nothing unusual in this use of the blog. The instructor, however, finds that the use of blogging software makes this previously odious chore much simpler.
Second, and often accompanying the first, instructors begin to link to Internet items that relate to their course.
Third, blogs are used to organize in-class discussions.
Fourth, some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings. Used in this way, the blogs become “group blogs”—that is, individual blogs authored by a group of people.
Finally, fifth, students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade.
Posted by at October 18, 2004 09:52 AM