The most basic definition of a blog, or weblog, is a web site with journal entries in reverse chronological order (most recent entries at the top of the page).
Common blog types include:
- Online diaries by individuals
- Personal blogs on a specific subject
- Organizational blogs used to inform customers about new products, services, etc.
- Course-related blogs used by teaching faculty as a place for their class to share information
There are lots of ways to use blogs in your courses. Some ideas include
- Each student has a blog (ex. individual course-related journal)
- Course blog with multiple contributors (ex. use to explore weekly readings)
- Project-related blog (ex. student groups discuss work on a shared project or experience)
- Instructor written blog (ex. instructor asks students to comment on course-related or subject-related posts)
There are issues to consider when using blogs as an instructional tool. Some of these issues are:
- student privacy - limit blog or blogs to just students in the class?
- faculty time - how much time do you want to spend
- student time - how does contributing to the blog/blogs factor into student class preparation time
- issues around speech - how to you handle negative or non-respectful posts or comments
It's very easy to set up a blog. The easiest way is the set up an account with an online blog hosting site. These services are either available for free or offer hosting for a small monthly fee.
You can also install blog hosting software to run your blog. These type of blogs are called server-side or self-hosted blogs. It take extra efforts to install these systems.
Blogger is a web-based blog hosting program. You can set up a free account and start blogging at any time!
- Go to Blogger.com
- Register for a free account
- Name your blog
- Choose a template (control the "look" of the blog)
Blogger supports multiple contributors so you could use it to set up class or single project blog.
During the session, I brought the library's Bloglines account and demonstrated how to add feeds. The class worked on adding feeds to their Bloglines account
There have been a lot of article written about blogs and learning. Newly published articles include:
For more information on blogs and other web tools, you may want to look at the following books (in the library's book collection):
- The Rough Guide to Blogging by Jonathan Yang
- Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson
