Blogs In Higher Education Research Articles

Exploring Perceptions and Experience of Educational Blogs in Higher Education of Bangladesh

The purpose of the research was to explore perceptions and experience of educational blogs of the students of higher education. The study followed a mixed method research approach. Supporting the research approach, the study followed both quantitative and qualitative instrument for better understanding of the research problem. First an open-ended questionnaire was supplied for 160 students from different institutes and departments of University of Dhaka, followed by six semi-structured interview with the teachers and finally a FGD was also conducted with students. The study reveals that most of the students and teachers are familiar with blogs. Both teachers and students expressed that they can perceive the intensifying role of blog in teaching –learning process. In addition to this, students find Blogs as a trendy digital platform to exchange views through collaboration with teachers. Teachers perceived a positive view on it pointing that genuine blogs can help to develop creative platform for transferring contemporary views although their use of blog is not satisfactory. Different factors like inauthenticity of sources, inaccessibility to internet, unpreparedness and unwillingness of senior teachers to use blogs have been identified as challenges of using blogs in education arena. Keywords: Educational Blogs, Digital platform, Challenges DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-14-07 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

Using a Project Blog to Promote Student Learning and Reflection

Research on the use of blogs in higher education suggests that students who blog as part of a course requirement demonstrate increased reflection, heightened feelings of connection, and increased course-related knowledge. Blogging provides a promising medium for students to engage in reflection on their participation in a cooperative education work term. Blogging can help guide a project by providing an encouraging place for team members to communicate clearly, document their work and other resources, and brainstorm ideas. In this paper, we describe a qualitative analysis of blog posts written by three students during a co-op placement. The students used the blog extensively and with multiple purposes: to reflect, to communicate, to brainstorm ideas, to evaluate literature, and to document team creations. We discuss the characteristics of the project and blog that may have contributed to its extensive use and provide recommendations for individuals interested in implementing a blog in similar projects.

Using a Project Blog to Promote Student Learning and Reflection

Research on the use of blogs in higher education suggests that students who blog as part of a course requirement demonstrate increased reflection, heightened feelings of connection, and increased course-related knowledge. Blogging provides a promising medium for students to engage in reflection on their participation in a cooperative education work term. Blogging can help guide a project by providing an encouraging place for team members to communicate clearly, document their work and other resources, and brainstorm ideas. In this paper, we describe a qualitative analysis of blog posts written by three students during a co-op placement. The students used the blog extensively and with multiple purposes: to reflect, to communicate, to brainstorm ideas, to evaluate literature, and to document team creations. We discuss the characteristics of the project and blog that may have contributed to its extensive use and provide recommendations for individuals interested in implementing a blog in similar projects.

Perception of Pedagogy Students About the Usefulness of Blogs in Education

The use of blogs, given their ease of creation and functionality, can be an opportunity for teachers in training to use ICT in education. In this research we ask what perception the teaching staff in training have of the use of blogs in an academic context of higher education and what experience of use and interaction with blogs they had at school level. For this reason, in order to obtain information at university level, we used the scale of assessment of the usefulness of blogs in higher education. A semi-structured interview was applied to learn about the experience of using and interacting with blogs at school level and how it projects the use of blogs as future teachers. The sample was 100 first-year students of pedagogy, enrolled in pedagogy careers of a faculty of education of a university in the south of Chile. The results indicate that, at the school level, most students did not use or interact with blogs, and that, at the higher education level, the least favored dimension is implementing curriculum by using blogs.

‘Yay! Not another academic essay!’ Blogging as an alternative academic genre

Abstract Academic writing is a staple university practice required across disciplines to determine student success. Despite its ubiquity, however, literacy scholars have long argued that academic writing is both exclusionary and prohibitive. Drawing on the work of literacy scholars we make the case for the use of blogs in higher education as a way of providing a type of inclusive writing or ‘regenring’ that such scholars advocate. To achieve this, we trial the use of a blog in a final-year undergraduate module, employing a mixed-methods approach to explore student perceptions on whether blogging affords them a means to engage with and take ownership of their writing and learning. In keeping with the task we have set our students, we have presented this article using blog-like features.

Beyond students’ perceptions: investigating learning presence in an educational blogging community

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present an integrated framework for designing and investigating students’ engagement patterns and learning presence in educational blogs. The framework was grounded on the ideas of self-directed and reflective learning, and was applied to analyse students’ blogging activities in the context of an undergraduate course.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed research framework was organized along three dimensions: content artefacts, blogging processes and community building. With regard to the methodological tools used, this study integrates content analysis of students’ posts using the framework of community of inquiry, the representation of learning mapping and social network analysis methods.FindingsThe results have revealed important information about the different ways of students’ engagement and learning presence within the blogging groups, the contribution and the influence each student had, as well as the structure and the cohesion of the learning community developed around the blogging project.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of this study are limited by the blended course features, the specific sample and the context of implementation. Future research needs to consider and analyse students’ lurking or invisible presence in educational blogging communities.Practical implicationsThis study has yielded promising results with regard to the design of educational blogs in higher education that aim to enhance students’ engagement, reflection, collaboration and self-directed learning.Originality/valueThe originality concerns the proposed conceptual framework which can guide the design, monitoring and analysis of blogging processes in order to reveal students’ learning presence within self-directed communities of blogging.

The use of a group blog to actively support learning activities

Despite the widespread use of blogs in higher education, there remains a lack of knowledge and consensus about the use and value of blogging in higher education, particularly when used for long periods. This article investigates the use of a group blog to assist traditional teaching activities and foster collaborative learning through the development of a sense of community. It describes how the blog project was implemented and the experiences of administrators and students in using the blog providing insights to educators. To assess students’ experience, a survey was administered to a sample of 135 undergraduate and graduate students. The results show that students find blogging a useful learning tool and that blogs can effectively be used to support learning activities for longer than one semester based on the blog visitors’ statistics and feedback. However, its capacity to build and sustain a sense of community was not as strong as expected. Students were more positive about the use of the blog as an information and promotional tool to share marketing news and information and publicize the degree, rather than for community building. Findings suggest that although the majority of students thought the system was helpful for sharing discipline-related knowledge and information, they are reluctant to participate in a regular and active way by posting – a resistance that applies also to teachers. Nevertheless, the findings also indicate that students’ participation levels can be successfully increased by means of the grading system.

Los blogs como entornos virtuales de enseñanza y aprendizaje en Educación Superior

En la actualidad, existe un interés pedagógico por transformar las tecnologías de la información y comunicación en tecnologías para el aprendizaje y el conocimiento. En este trabajo se presentan una serie de contribuciones didácticas asociadas al uso de blogs en la Educación Superior a partir de una experiencia de innovación educativa por proyectos llevada a cabo por un grupo de profesores universitarios entre los años 2009 y 2013. Tanto el profesorado como el alumnado participante en las asignaturas donde se ha puesto en práctica el edublog, lo verifican como un recurso útil para conformar entornos virtuales de enseñanza y aprendizaje gracias a las múltiples potencialidades que ofrece. Entre ellas se destacan: facilitar el acceso al conocimiento, promover una participación más activa y reflexiva en la construcción de los aprendizajes, amplificar la experiencia social del aprendizaje, proporcionar evidencias sobre el progreso de los estudiantes que ayuden a reorientar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje y estimular el juicio crítico. No obstante, también se identifican problemas relacionados con la participación de los estudiantes y con la gestión de los edublogs por parte del profesorado.

Using Blogs in the Marketing and Advertising Classroom: Exploratory Insights and Recommendations for Future Use

The use of blogs in business and higher education is increasing, yet little is written about using blogs in marketing or advertising education. The authors review the literature about using blogs in higher education and explain their benefits and pedagogical importance for marketing, advertising, business and journalism/mass communications classes. An author's pedagogical experiences with using blogs in an e-Marketing course and with a study abroad program are described and the qualitative feedback from the student participants is reviewed. In general, students enjoyed their blogging experience, felt that they had improved their skills and recommended the tool's continued use. The authors' recommendations for using blogs in the marketing, advertising, business or journalism/ mass communications classroom and suggestions for further research are also presented.

Reading and writing about literature on the Internet. Two innovative experiences with blogs in higher education

This paper describes two innovative experiences with ICT in teacher training by means of the development of two blogs about children’s and young adults’ literature. The study of both activities shows the usefulness of blogs in higher education and their contribution to the linguistic and literary training of future teachers. The results show that the creation of a literature blog enhances communicative skills in a digital environment, enlarges the students’ literary competence, improves the future teachers’ didactic training, increases the participants’ motivation and encourages independent learning and shared knowledge building by means of peer interaction.

Academic blogs: A platform for sharing information and disseminating knowledge

In this article, keywords are analysed in a corpus comprising two academic blogs in higher education, specifically dealing with issues of Open Distance Learning (ODL). WordSmith Tools was used to extract keywords from the blogs, and the thematically significant keywords were then analysed. The keywords were grouped according to three classes. Firstly, the first person pronoun ‘I’ was discussed to analyse the style and authorial voice in the blogs. Next, localised keywords that occur frequently in specific blog posts were discussed. Thirdly, keywords related to the theme of higher education such as ‘students’ and ‘distance’ were analysed. The final section of the findings looked at issues of power in these blogs. The findings show that Siemens’ and Prinsloo's academic blogs are an accessible source of information regarding higher education that have the potential to be successfully integrated into teaching and learning.

Educational Blogging: The Case of Graduate MLIS Students in Kuwait

Blogging has been well-established as a communication tool, yet the literature documenting its use in education is still developing and lacks the theoretical underpinning to back it up. Blogging in education and for education has critics as well as promoters. This research is a phenomenological study that aims to create a framework and rationale for the use of blogs in higher education. It is a comparative descriptive analysis of two educational blogging experiences in Kuwait: one is a blog used by a faculty member in the Library and Information Science Department at Kuwait University that is shared with graduate students attending the courses of that faculty. The second is administered by a former graduate student of the MLIS program at Kuwait University and is open to both faculty and students. A comparison of the two experiences is the basis for the analysis and generalizations provided about the use of blogs as an educational tool and for drawing a framework for using blogs in education.

My 2012 To-Do List for Teaching, Research, and Scholarship

LIKE MOST OF YOU, I like to start the new year with a list of resolutions. This year, I made a list of new tools that can help me be a better teacher and a better organized researcher and scholar. As always, I started by dusting off my social bookmarks to examine those items I bookmarked recently. I subscribe to lots of services (e.g., blogs, slideshare, tables of content from technology magazines and journals) so I constantly bookmark interesting new tools as well as content for my research, my courses, and this column. Here is what I found. Web-Based Apps PREZI This presentation software allows you to co-create presentations in a nonlinear format (unlike, for example, PowerPoint). This 21st century hypermedia platform allows you to create slides with associative links rather than linear progression. Zoom in, pan left or right, pull out to see the bigger picture, and zoom in again to focus on details. Prezi offers different licensing agreements (Public, free; Enjoy, $59/year; Pro, $159/year) and student/teacher licenses. Check it out at http://prezi.com/index/. CONNOTEA This is a free online reference manager for researchers, clinicians, and scientists. I have used Delicious, a social bookmarking tool, for years, but now need to share more than just websites with my research team and doctoral students. This web-based product, offered by Nature Publishing Group, publisher of the prestigious journal Nature, does not require downloading. It is easy to use and allows you to save bookmarks, references from PubMed, publisher PDFs, and even Amazon book references. It will recognize the reference and populate bibliographic information where possible. You can tag items as you please and easily share them with colleagues, the public, or a select group (e.g., your PhD students or research team). Check it out at www.connotea.org. VOICETHREAD Since I teach online and assign a lot of team projects, I am always looking for tools that foster collaboration. VoiceThread allows you to share multimedia and comment in five different modalities: telephone (helpful for rural areas without good bandwidth), voice on a microphone, text, audio file, or video via webcam. I have seen it used in several blogs in higher education and want to explore its use not only in our online program, but with our social network. Imagine the debates we could have on hot issues in informatics. The fee associated with VoiceThread is reasonable. Click on Products, Higher Education, and you will not only see the fee structure and licenses, but a compilation of research that documents the effectiveness of the tool. Check it out at http://voicethread.com/. Data Visualization Tools With the current data deluge, it will become more and more important to use different tools to present data in our courses, in presentations, and for decisionmaking in the health care and academic environments. I recommend starting with videos by Hans Rosling that depict new ways to present data in interesting ways: * Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo * Hans Rosling: No More Boring Data: TEDTalks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w * Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w In 2010, my colleagues Deborah Vincent, Marie Hastings- Tolsma, and Judith Effken published a great article, with good examples, on visualization tools for presenting data from large datasets. See Data Visualization and Large Nursing Datasets at the Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 14(2); http://ojni. …

The effects of the use of blogs on the learning process of sea sports in the framework of higher education

There is ever-greater interest in the use of web technologies such as blogs in higher education. This study was designed to identify the perceptions held by students regarding the process of learning and interacting with their co-students through using blogs as part of their higher education experience. Twenty, 5th-year students, 12 male and 8 female, studying for the Sciences of Physical Activity and Sport degree took part in the study. Each subject was interviewed by two interviewers and recorded on audio using a conventional tape-recorder. A descriptive analysis was carried beforehand, the statistics used for this consisted of frequency analysis distribution. After grouping by categories, the answers were analysed and classified by factors. Eighty-five percent of the subjects stated that the creation of the blogs had helped them in their learning process. Seventy percent believed that e-learning facilitates learning. Ninety percent stated that the blog helped them to acquire more knowledge, and 100% agreed that their relationships with their co-students had increased considerably. These results could underline the positive value of using blogs within teaching processes for university students studying sports sciences.

Open the Windows of Communication: Promoting Interpersonal and Group Interactions Using Blogs in Higher Education

An international association advancing the multidisciplinary study of informing systems. Founded in 1998, the Informing Science Institute (ISI) is a global community of academics shaping the future of informing science.

Blogging in the academy

AbstractThis chapter discusses the use of blogs in higher education, including how students and instructors use blogs, the value of blogs in this setting, and privacy and security implications. The chapter also features an examination of the University of Minnesota's UThink blogging system.