Blogs, blogs, blogs! The term has been getting a lot of attention lately. Everywhere you look someone is trying to get you to look at their blog. I must confess I loved the recent TV advert where an ‘Internetlessness’ person misunderstands her suitors intentions when he asked her to take a peep at his blog. Slaps ensue.

Blogs are supposedly very hip, very in... very Web 2.0 at the moment and if you want to be where it’s happening on the Internet you have to have one or at least subscribe to someone else’s.  Maybe, as educators, we should be considering if this technology can support teaching and learning? We teachers have being harnessing the fashionably hip and cool ‘things’ for decades in an attempt to make our subjects relevant and engaging to a younger audience. We now teach parts of the History syllabus as if its part of a Film Studies course, Maths now embraces the calculator, once considered the tool of lazy youth and so on. So can we harness blogs as part of our teaching arsenal?

Well, yes, is the easy answer. A blog is no more than an online interactive journal where a blogger’s public ponderings are put on display with an invitation for others to comment. On the web the more interesting the blogger is the more traffic it attracts. When the film director Peter Jackson was working on the remake of King Kong he kept a daily blog. Film buffs and fans flocked to the blog for the low down on the daily frustrations of making a block buster as well as a good dose of ‘skinner’ about the stars.

But let’s face it, neither you nor I are a Peter Jackson or some busty starlet. No kid is going to flock to our blog on the finer points of teaching Historiography.  We need to reinvent the use of the technology if we want it to work for us as an education tool.

Outcomes Based Education posits the responsibility for learning with the learner. They are supposed to acquire self reflective skills that help them understand what it is they still need to learn in order to gain proficiency.  As facilitators of this learning process we try to make them keep journals for assignments, always unpopular with the students, and even allocate marks for this activity to motivate them.  One criticism is that the students write up the journal entries but never really spend the time to interrogate the content of their entries.

This might be a good time to bring on the blogs. Blogs are online public journals where others have an opportunity to comment. Let’s make the learners the bloggers and their critical class mates can help them focus on what they have written by making suggestions and offering solutions. The teacher would be the moderator but most of the discussion would be between peers. This means that the blogger would be a bit more vigilant in making themselves clear if they know others will read the blog entries. It will still be necessary for the teacher to devise a set of open questions for the bloggers to respond to so that issues around learning will be tackled by the class. It might also be necessary to divide the class up into ‘critical friend’ groups to ensure that everyone gets some comments on their blog.  The bottom line of course is that what was a tedious exercise in journal writing has been transformed into a fun learning about learning experience using blogs.

START A BLOG So where can you sign up your class to start their blogs? There are a number of free blog services on the Internet where anyone can register and start. The most famous ones are: Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/ WordPress: http://www.wordpress.com/ As blogs are all automated you do not have to be a power user to get going. Choose a colour scheme and then start writing.