Weblogs in Education and Training
Clancy Ratliff
Metropolitan State University
1 November 2004
Introduction
Jill Walker, Definition of Weblog
Jill Walker, notes for “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network”
Meg Hourihan, What We're Doing When We Blog
Weblogs in Education
From http://culturecat.net/onlinewriting:
One of the best reasons for using weblogs in writing courses is the potential for community interaction that weblogs can help to facilitate. While this is not true in all cases, and some writing teachers have critiqued weblogs' community-building potential, I have found that a course weblog (one community weblog for the whole class) to be an excellent way for students to get to know each other and to learn from each other. If your objective is to create a learning community, weblogs can help you achieve it by giving students a space to share their writing with other students in the class, who have the opportunity to leave comments under their classmates' posts. Weblogs are also a powerful tool for teaching students about writing for an audience, as they are public, and they reach an audience of not only the teacher and the other students in the class, but also readers outside the class who leave comments.
If your objective is to help students synthesize information and make connections through writing, weblogs can help you meet this objective by allowing students to take advantage of the Web. Weblog software makes it easy for students to create content for the Web without knowing much HTML, find online articles related to topics discussed in class, and share them easily with other students. In my experience, blogging encourages associative thinking.
Questions/Issues Raised by Weblogs in Writing Pedagogy
- Having students keep individual blogs v. one community blog for the class, or several small-group blogs: advantages and disadvantages of each
- Privacy for the students (if real names are used, people can find the students via Google)
- Requiring weblog posts, or offering the option of keeping a print journal instead
- The possible feeling on the part of the instructor of being "exposed" if students complain about the class on the blog
- Outside participation: the fact that anyone outside the class can read the blog and leave comments (and they do)
- Assessing weblog posts
- Creating weblog post prompts (and the question of whether there should be prompts, or if the students should have the option to deviate from the prompt topic to a topic of his or her choice)
- Avoiding "forced blogging"
- Best practices for integrating the weblog into class discussion
Associative Thinking Through Blogging
Weblogs in Training
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