The use of weblogs in higher education
Weblogs are personal web pages written in chronological order and maintained through aspecific software that helps their administration. From an educational point of view, as a complement to traditional lectures or as an e-learning tool.
One of the latest developments that HEIs are starting to implement in their teaching-learning processes is the use of weblogs as a means for transferring the usual classroom activities to cyberspace while conferring students and instructors with superior connectivity for the development of one-on-one and many-to one relationships.
The format is normally to add the newest entry at the top of the page, so that repeat visitors can catch up by simply reading down the page until they reach a link they saw on their last visit
The present relevancy of this kind of tool lies in the changes in the classroom dynamics, is the substitution of conventional education for autonomous learning, as well as the increasing number of Open Universities and virtual–environment courses offered by traditional HEIs.
Related work
A learning log is a tightly focused academic journal that is created as the student becomes knowledgeable on an individually assigned topic. The log can serve as the basis for generating Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), support class discussion, and provide the basis for the creation of a class presentation and web site.
The benefits that weblogs offer as improved learning logs: students can share their results with others; students can focus on the content; students learn about web page creation in an intuitive way; students can jointly write a weblog, instructors can monitor published weblogs easily; and finally, instructor does not need to convert student documents and publish them, as it is already done.
WEBLOG TYPES, USES AND ADVANTAGES
BENEFITS AND BARRIERS
Types
Uses
Advantages
The proposed classification is based on two dimensions: style and content. Regarding style, there are interactive weblogs and the closed weblogs mostly based on whether the weblog author allows for comments on the weblog. In relation to the content, there are many sorts of weblogs: personal topics, political/social/economic commentaries, information technology, etc. Merging the styles and the contents, some types are suggested: personal journal, links galore, interactive commentary, one-way commentary, hodge-podge, etc. In addition, Mernit [14] proposes eight types of weblogs according to the author of the weblog: the professional journalist; the non-traditional journalist; bloggers focused on a specific theme; the education community; the self-expression/journaling crowd; the
business/marketing/promotion community; business weblogs behind the firewall; and the experimenters and innovators.
There are many uses for weblogs in many fields: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opinions; expressing deeply felt emotions; articulating ideas through writing; and forming and maintaining community forums. Specifically, in the education field, weblogs are being used to satisfy a variety of communication
needs to favor e-learning practices. a list of possible uses is provided in improving writing skills, encouraging reflective writing, reading student weblogs for assessment, sharing resources and ideas, recording progress and process, course administration, group work, etc.Also, there are five ways of using weblogs in the classroom: standard class web pages, professor-written weblogs which cover
interesting developments that relate to the theme of the course; organization of in-class discussion; organization of intensive seminars where students have to provide weekly summaries of the readings; and requiring students to write their own weblogs as part of their grade.
-Are easy to setup and administrate in contrast to other technologies.
-makes easier to publish all types of resources to the Web when compared to traditional web publishing.
-Weblogs can be updated easily, from anywhere without having to worry about FTP
connections, web authoring software.
.Weblogs have the ability to reach a large audience without losing information quality and allowing for different levels of detail.
-No special blogging software is needed to create a weblog.
Benefits
Barriers
-The teaching-learning process can continue outside the classroom.
- Weblogs help create connections between students with diverse opinions and interests.
-Weblogs’ features make it easier to share knowledge and information.
-Collaborative weblogs support teamwork and group learning. - teachers may benefit from the possibility of monitoring projects in real time, thus indicating improvements before it is too late for the students to incorporate them.
-The use of weblogs prepares students better for the current labour market
-Instructors may have difficulty in assessing student participation in the weblog.
-System administrators tend to be restrictive in installing new software.
-If the weblog is public, it may suffer troll infestations, people that intentionally try to cause
disruption by posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, or offtopic, with the intent of provoking a reaction from others