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This document discusses the educational use of blogs in U.S. education, highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and major software for creation. It emphasizes the potential of blogs as effective educational tools that encourage knowledge sharing and engagement among educators and students. The paper aims to motivate more educators to incorporate blogs into their teaching and research practices.

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10 views1 page

Micro 1111

This document discusses the educational use of blogs in U.S. education, highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and major software for creation. It emphasizes the potential of blogs as effective educational tools that encourage knowledge sharing and engagement among educators and students. The paper aims to motivate more educators to incorporate blogs into their teaching and research practices.

Uploaded by

1314apt
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Oct. 2008, Volume 5, No.10 (Serial No.

47) US-China Education Review, ISSN1548-6613, USA

Exploring educational use of blogs in U.S. education

WANG Hong
(Center for Teaching Excellence & Learning Technologies, Fort Hays State University, Hays KS 67601, USA)

Abstract: As one of the Web 2.0 tools, blogs are widely used in US education. This paper gives a brief
overview of blogs such as advantages, disadvantages, and major software for creating blogs, and then it reviews
some EduBlogs, its usage, and examples in US education. The purpose is to motivate more educators to use blogs
in teaching and research as well as introduce blogs as useful educational tools and its great potentials.
Key words: blogs; Web 2.0; bloggers; WordPress

1. An overview of blogs

What is a blog? Proclaimed as the “Word of the Year” in 2004 by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
2004, a blog is a short term of “web log”—an online chronological collection of personal commentary and links.
A blog is part of the Web 2.0 family, the second generation of web adventure. There are many types of blogs, such
as LibLogs (library blogs) and EduBlogs (education blogs). A blog can be regarded as an online journal, and it is
very easy to maintain a blog. A blogger enters posts into a blogging application and save the post. Blogging does
not require programming languages or server knowledge from bloggers. The posts can include text, hyperlinks,
images, or multimedia components. The content is available online and users who have subscribed to the blog will
be alerted about the new posts. Visitors can read the posts and submit the comments. Most blogs are primarily
textual, but there are also audio blogs, video blogs, and photo blogs.
There are both advantages and disadvantages for blogs. Blogs engage people in knowledge sharing and
reflection, and they often attract a large readership. Instead of providing static information, blogs allow users and
readers to respond, to create, and to connect. It is also simple to create and maintain blogs. Compared with
discussion board, blogs have greater sense of permanence. After a course is over, the discussion board is no longer
accessible to the students. When a student creates a blog, he or she also has a sense of ownership. Library bloggers
have much to say about the value of blogs. Blogs are “a great investment of technology and time to engage with
our customers directly” as well as “an opportunity to test out how to augment employee communications”
(Brookover, 2007, p. 31).
There are also some downsides of blogs such as inaccuracy of the information, intellectual property issues,
and the volatile nature. Blogs are often produced and maintained by individuals, so they may include biased or
inaccurate information. Intellectual property is another area of concerning for higher education since the blogs
may include content that has been used without proper attribution. Blogs are highly volatile. Bloggers can edit and
delete posts. This transient nature makes blogs difficult to archive or index.
There are two major categories of software: hosting services and installed applications. A hosting service
refers to a website that gives access to everything needed to create a blog. People who use hosting services do not
need any knowledge about HTML and the web servers. The best-known hosting service is Blogger

WANG Hong, Ph.D., Center for Teaching Excellence & Learning Technologies, Fort Hays State University; research fields:

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