A teacher's reflections on educational applications of blogs with a postgraduate class

Abstract

This article outlines one teachers exploration of educational applications of blogs with a class of postgraduate students in the Hong Kong University over a period of one semester in 2006 and reflects on its outcomes.Rather than using the usual learning management system to support learning of the class that the teacher organised a blog-based environment where students accessed course material, posted reflections featuring artefacts created in the learning tasks, commented on each others contributions, and in other ways participated on a regular basis throughout the semester. The blog-environment comprised a connected community of interlinked-blogs belonging to individual students. The experience from the exercise suggests that when appropriately managed by a teacher, blogs have the potential to effectively support teaching and learning activities. It is intended that the experience reported in this article be added to this growing list of emerging explorations of applications of Web 2.0 in education © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.