Blogs

A blog, the shortened form of weblog is an online diary-like communication in an informal writing style. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a blog is ‘a regular record of your thoughts, opinions, or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read’ (Cambridge Dictionary). Minaev (2022) describes a blog as ‘an online journal or informational website displaying information in reverse chronological order …’, that is, with the most recent appearing at the top. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as ‘a website that contains online personal reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, videos, and photographs provided by the writer’. Blogs give room for feedback from readers who may ask questions about the topic and they give room for the blogger to respond, that is, to provide additional information that they never thought of including while writing the blog. The feedback may also give room for providing clarifications on matters not adequately address in the initial post. By nature, blogs give room for dialogue or conversation, an interesting departure from newspaper writing which is unidirectional. Blogging has become an interesting way of bouncing ones’ ideas off other people in order to get high quality and highly-refined ideas to work with. It is, in other words, a way to benefit from collaborative intelligence.

Information on how to create a blog and write blog posts can be assessed through this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8rN3JKqUc8

Presently, there are more than 572 million blogs globally, with about 7 million blog posts published daily (Djuraskovic, 2022). Research has shown that blogging makes for improved learning experience because it is participatory(Montero-Fleta & Pérez-Sabater, 2010). One study shows that blogging improves students’ writing in terms of the content, choice of words and language, and the writing style (Alsamadani, 2017). In addition, research shows that students have a positive attitude towards blogging for learning (Ahluwalia, 2011).Source: https://www.treehugger.com/

Teachers seeking to make the most of collaborative intelligence need to consider the inclusion of blogs to their tools or media for learning. They support assessment for learning and give room for crowd sourcing of ideas.

References

Ahluwalia, G. (n.d.). The Use of Blogs in English Language Learning: A Study of Student Perceptions. . . ISSN, 13(2).

Alsamadani, H. A. (2017). The Effectiveness of Using Online Blogging for Students’ Individual and Group Writing. International Education Studies, 11(1), 44. https://doi.org/10.5539/ies.v11n1p44

Montero-Fleta, B., & Pérez-Sabater, C. (2010). A research on blogging as a platform to enhance language skills. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 773–777. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.100