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Pedagogical implications of classroom blogging.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper discusses blogs, as an educational tool. In this paper, the authors discuss the pedagogical framework for blogging in the classroom, the importance of it, and provide a model for implementation. Additionally, benefits and concerns are identified. The authors conclude by making suggestions for future research in this area.

Introduction

In recent years, students have experienced learning in Internet-based activities such as bulletin boards, Web-based research, and communicating with people from geographically dispersed locations (Ferdig & Roehler, 2003; Ferdig, 2003). Most recently, educators have highlighted the potential of blogs, or blogs, and blogging in teaching and learning (Oravec, 2003; Carroll, 2003). Blogs are Web pages often likened to online journals (Blood, 2002), which provide a "soapbox" for people to share their thoughts and ideas (Walker, 2005). Blogs are typically written by amateurs describing first-person experiences; as such, the text stands alone without interference from editors or expectations (Winer, 2003). Where original definitions concentrated on the anatomy of a blog (Barrett, 1999), more contemporary definitions focus on the societal and personal impact of the technology as well as the role of narrative in blogging (Walker, 2005). Winer (2001) posits that blogs are personal in nature and a part of a community and Oravec (2003) adds that blogs make the Internet more "human scale."

Blogs first began cropping up on the Internet in the mid-1990s. Internet-industry workers, then the only ones who knew how to program Web pages, would upload lists of links that they wanted their friends to visit (Blood, 2002). In the late 1990s software companies created the database-driven content management tools needed to run blogs so that non-coders could start their own blogs. When blogging became easier than creating a Web page, it started to become more popular. In the late 1990s there were only about 150 blogs (Blood, 2002), whereas today's estimates find more than 4.12 million blogs (Perseus, 2003).

Blogs Compared to Other Web-based Tools

Blogs have been likened to either Web pages or online discussion forums (Trammell & Gasser, 2004). All are similar in that they are a) computer-mediated, b) contained published messages, c) occur asynchronously, d) and are shared with an unknown public/audience. Even so, blogs are not just Web pages, nor do they perform the same function (Trammell & Gasser, 2004). Blog researchers have suggested the following distinctions between blogs and normal Web pages: the role of the hyperlink (Blood, 2002) and the interactivity it creates (Trammell & Gasser, 2004), frequency of updating content (Blood, 2002), the archive of content (Trammell & Gasser, 2004), and the role of community (Halavais, 2003).

Hyperlinks on blogs are designed to stretch outward into the World Wide Web to bring news stories, comments, pictures, and other items outside...

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