BP2_2010051_EducationalUsesForBlogs

I am the Instructional Technology Supervisor at a private 4-year college. We have been using blogs for a variety of academic purposes, and here are my observations on some of them.

Blogs as an e-portfolio tool
My school has long had an e-Portfolio program. Originally, students were asked to create portfolios using webpage authoring software. This became a huge problem over time because students are not necessarily web developers. They could write the content but the sites were often aesthetically poor, thus defeating the point of showcasing their academic growth.


A few years ago, after a lot of research, we decided to follow Harvard Law Schools' Weblogs model and added our own twist by using Wordpress MU (multi-user) as a new platform for student e-portfolios. 


Blogging software allows users to focus on content copy and reduces design headaches thanks to built in templates.  Another benefit is the fact that blog posts are naturally in reverse chronological order, making it easy for the visitor to see a student's current growth and back-track to the beginning.


In Michigan, education students have to demonstrate certain competencies via electronic means s in order to be licensed by the state to teach in K-12. While some of our students who are not education majors create blogs on our general server, our student teachers have their own server to server their special needs. Sara Baum's Student Teaching Portfolio is pictured above.


Blogs to promote academic programs

Blogging caught on like wildfire on our campus. Suddenly, it wasn't just for portfolios anymore. Faculty wanted to use them to document student research, field trips and other academic departments like the library decided to get on the bandwagon, too. Check out the biology students' search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida this past spring.


Why blogs work in academia
The answer is simple - blogs are cheap/free to implement and easy to use and access.  Blog posts can be added anytime and anywhere there is a web browser and Internet connection, plus many blogging platforms support email and cell phone text posts.  From the administrative and technical/support side of things (which is where I sit), they can offer a low-cost alternative to pricey software applications and hosted services. Wordpress MU is free, open-source software and so is its underlying server architecture, and it is just about as easy to manage from the "backend."  The only cost for us is the web-server's operating system licensing, which is covered by our campus-wide license model.

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References:

Albion College Library. (2010). Library News. Retrieved from http://campus.albion.edu/library.

Baum, S. (2010). Sara Baum’s professional portfolio. Retrieved from http://teach.albion.edu/smb15/.

Harvard Law School weblogs. (2010). Retrieved from http:// blogs.law.harvard.edu.

McCaffrey, V. (2010).  Biology of sub-tropical Florida: in search of the Fountain of Youth. Retrieved from: http://campus.albion.edu/florida10.

Wordpress MU. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://mu.wordpress.org.