The Two-Punch Power of Weblogs in Education

Rather than focusing on a single tool, this piece will address a phenomenon which, for the example it sets, underscores the importance of new programs like BEAT. That phenomenon is both an idea and a set of tools known as personal Webpublishing -also known as weblogging, or blogging, after its most prominent form. Here, specifically, we will look at how weblogs are making an impacting on education.

By shortening and simplifying content publication and processing, personal Web publishing practices, like weblog authoring, content aggregation and syndication, and the formation of conversational networks, address a number of important needs of today's learning environment. To keep things simple, here we will highlight just two -what might be called the two-punch power of weblogs in education.

Support for organic, personalized, collaborative learning networks

As the speed at which information travels and accumulates, continues to accelerate, our learning needs change significantly. At this speed, there is no model learning process, or indeed, no clear, stable and discrete body of knowledge for us to seek out and define.

Instead, know-how and skills must be cultivated to help us to discern and harness information and to constantly relearn in a highly personalized, self-directed, and accelerated fashion.

Next month, a team of leading researchers is presenting a compelling body of evidence to the ED-Media Conference that will describe how the advent of personal Webpublishing practices, in various ways, carry enormous potential for personalized collaborative learning both inside and outside our formal institutional systems. As their proposal outlines, they will describe how the growing interest in these new tools and developments within the educational community is reflected in an increasingly rich online discourse, the establishment of more and more personal Webpublishing projects for educational purposes, the first signs of community building (see for example the Educational Bloggers Network), and pilot projects in schools and institutions of higher education.

Read more about the research here:
Seb's Open Research
View the Proposal

Campus Community

It's one thing for a school to wait for select motivated students and instructors, possessing basic technical skills, to take their voice and creativity to the web. It's quite another thing for a school to take advantage of simple and cheap yet powerful tools to give an opportunity to all, even those with no technical skill whatsoever, to express themselves on the web and to participate in collaborative online networks. Progressive schools like Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society have certainly taken to using weblogs to create and enhance campus community and spirit. There seems to be as many benefits to blogging, and its various applications, as there are bloggers. Providing a light-weight framework for supporting personalized, collaborative learning is certainly high on the list. But a campus-wide blogging service is also about connecting formerly disparate groups and ideas, opening new lines of communication and building community.

Berkman isn't the only school that's onto these tools. Uthink, for example, available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota, is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community. At the School of Informatics, of State University of New York at Buffalo, their weblog server allows students, faculty, and alumni to better communicate their research and other activities. Any individual or group related to the school may request their own blog by filling our a simple request. The list is, in fact, long and growing.