by Paul Hummel
Blogs have grown increasingly popular among college instructors and their students. They serve a variety of purposes, all aimed helping students learn.
In 1999, the year the term “blog” was first used, blogs were not common. However, blog use quickly spread as a social networking media and as an educational tool. Today, instructors at colleges and universities across the United States are using blogs to enhance their courses and help students learn. Effective instructional blogs can be simple, and the ways in which they can be used are limited only by the instructor’s imagination.
How College Instructors Use Blogs Steven Downes (2004), in his article "Educational Blogging," reported the increasing use of blogs by educators. Relative to their use as an online personal journal, Downes wrote, “In the hands of teachers and students, blogs become something more again. The Web is by now a familiar piece of the educational landscape.” Downes identified five ways in which instructors use blogs, which were as:
1) A replacement for a class Webpage
2) A to link to Internet resources that relate to their course
3) A means for organizing in-class discussions
4) A way to organize class seminars and provide reading summaries
5) A graded assignment for students, who write their own blogs
Jude Higdon and Chad Topaz (2009) used blogs in a different manner. They applied the concept of Just-in-Time Teaching to blogging. The night before class, they had their college math students identify the most difficult part of the assignment and the most interesting part. Their Just-in-Time Teaching system used RSS syndication technology to aggregate all the responses. Then, prior to class, they would scan the responses, identify common themes and areas of difficulty, and adjust class time allocation accordingly.
There are boundless opportunities for college faculty members to use blogs to enhance student learning. A good way to explore those opportunities is by reviewing existing blogs.
Examples of College Course Blogs Rimrats and Blogglob are the names of two University of Arizona blogs that were used in conjunction with two journalism courses. Though inactive, they provide excellent examples of blogs can be used in higher education.
The University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism maintains an active blog. This site is not devoted to any one course, but rather illustrates how faculty in a given department can collaborate for the benefit of their students. A quick glance will show the viewer a fairly complex, if not intimidating, blob that might discourage the educator considering his or her first blog.
A prospective educational blogger should not be scared away by the complexity or the arguably intimidating technology. An effective course blog can be simple. Take for example what San Diego City College’s adjunct instructor Connie Terwilliger created for her students. Terwilliger’s blog is a simple two-column format, but it provides good ideas for the first-time blogger. Her blog was constructed using a template provided by WordPress, a popular free blog host. If you know how to use email and how to surf the web, you probably have the skills necessary to create your first blog.
Do Course Blogs Help College Students? Goldman, Cohen and Sheahan (2008) studied the impact of “seminar blogs” on students in graduate-level public health course. More than 90 percent of the students indicated that the class blog enriched their learning experience to some degree, with roughly half of them stating “quite a bit.” The responses to the question “Did the blog provide more opportunity to learn from classmates?" drew similar responses. In comparison to speaking in class, 10 percent found blogging harder, but 60 percent said it was much easier. A particularly interesting, though not necessarily surprising, finding was that the blog seemed to help non-native English speakers the most. The authors speculated that the blog contributed to student learning by engaging the students and exposing them to collaborative learning.
The above study was conducted at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the authors make no claim that their results apply in other realms. To the contrary, many educators question the benefits of blogs. As with every aspect of teaching and learning, the effectiveness of a college course blog hinges on how good a job the instructor does. And it also hinges on how conscientiously students use the blog. It seems clear, however, that blogs would not have gained such extensive popularity in higher education if they were not serving a purpose.
Source:
http://www.suite101.com/content/blogs-as-tools-for-college-instructors-a257907