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The use of weblogs in higher education benefits and barriers (Benefits…
The use of weblogs in higher education benefits and barriers
Weblogs are personal web pages written in chronological order and maintained through a specific software that helps their administration
use
There are many uses for weblogs in many fields. Nardi [15] discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opinions; expressing deeply felt emotions; articulating ideas through writing; and forming and maintaining community forums.Certainly, these motivations are not mutually exclusive and might come into play simultaneously.
types
In order to understand the functioning of weblogs, the first thing to be done is to address their nature.
In this line of thought, literature shows some attempts to classify weblogs in terms of different features. For instance, in the proposed classification is based on two dimensions: style and content.
Teacher weblog
Student weblog
Advantages
Weblogs can be updated easily, from anywhere without having to worry about FTP connections, web authoring software, etc.
Weblogs have the ability to reach a large audience without losing information quality and allowing for different levels of detail. Weblogs break the trade off between reach and richness of information.
Weblogs makes easier to publish all types of resources (text, images, video, etc.) to the Web
when compared to traditional web publishing.
Weblogs are easy to setup and administrate in contrast to other technologies.
24/7 (anytime, anywhere) access to information posted in weblogs.
Benefits
Final grading is faster and easier: instructors are able to review how students have
participated and developed over the course.
The use of weblogs (new technologies) prepares students better for the current labour market.
Collaborative weblogs support team work and group learning.
Barriers
System administrators tend to be restrictive in installing new software.
Even though most weblogs are hosted in public, free ASPs, learning weblogs should behosted in private servers, so that they do not show neither advertisements nor banners (which
are the most common method of ASPs financing).
nstructors may have difficulty in assessing student participation in the weblog. There areseveral indicators to take into account: group grading, individual posting, quality of posts, etc., as well as subjectivity vs. qualitative appreciations.
Security concerns
Should there be a concern about people posting under other people's names?
What happens with the information once it is published? As a final point, people should be aware of the future effects of the information hosted in a weblog, since, as Nielsen has pointed out, yesterday’s a comment may be read by future employers.