Blogging in educational contexts

The increasing amount of weblogs¹ reached the fields of educational practice.² The discussion about different and new forms of blogging reached also the field of eLearning (in Germany).³
This work will give an overview about blogging tools which could be used to support educational activities and learning. After giving a technical explanation of these tools a theoretical framework will lead us to different usecases and examples on how these tools could be integrated in formal, non-formal and informal learning and how individuals and institutions could benefit from blogs in these fields.
The result of a survey about seminarblogs will add some empirical information beside the high varity of concepts and examples. An insight into the methodilogical procced of the survey will care about the transperency of it and show the strengths and weaknesses of the used surveytool.
In the end the conclusion discusses whether blogs should be used in educational contexts with pros and cons and whether blogs might be a bridge building element between different educational fields and learning concepts.
To get a better understanding of the upcoming information one should have, at least, a kind of definition of a blog. But there are several descriptions of blogs and a lot of services on the web⁴ which claim to be a blog. Within this work the following definition for the term “Blog” will be used:

“A Blog is a system which aims to log Information on the web in a reverse chronological order. These logged Information have a permalink and a timestamp.” ⁵

The reason for this pretty broad description is that in general all blogging services aim to log Information on the web. That is also the origin of the word weblog or blog if you prefer the short and meanwhile more common version. It consists of two parts, the terms „Logbook“ and „World Wide Web“ and was coined by John Barger in 1997⁶. All Blogs are a list of entries in a descending chronological order with a time-stamp.

1. Schmidt, J. 2006, p. 15 [↩]
2. Bernhardt/Kirchner 2007, p. 69 & Efimova, L., & Fiedler, S. 2004, p. 4 [↩]
3. Appelt, R. 2009 [↩]
4. Rowse, D. 2005 [↩]
5. Appelt, R. 2009b [↩]
6. Wikipedia, 2009 [↩]

Depending on the options one can divide between three different kinds of blogs. These are Microblogs, Tumblelogs and traditional Weblogs. The difference between these variations of blogs is the amount of features they offer as described below. The term blog and weblog are usually used synonymicaly. Blog is a short version for Weblog.

Blogs are created out of entries, permalinks, archive, comments, trackbacks, feeds, tags and a blogroll. (Ebersbach, A.; Glaser, M.; Heigl, R. 2008, p. 62f) The central element are the entries (also called postings or posts). They consist out of a heading and the post content which is created out of text, images, videos and other media. With the publishing of the post a timestamp will be created, which means date and time of the publishing will be attached to the post in the database and by this the time the post was published is always visible. It is again the timestamp which helps to create an archive for the whole blog.

Every post gets his own url¹ (the webadress) by which it can be accessed. This address is called permalink. By having permalinks it is possible to reference each single post directly and not only link to the whole webpage. It is therefore possible to write comments to specific posts and link to this content e.g. out of RSS-Feeds. By publishing a blogpost it is stored in a chronological Archive which makes it easier to find posts by date. Beside the chronological archive one often has an archive ordered by categories which can be assigned to the posts by the author. There are also tags which help organising the blog content. Each blogpost can be labeld with several tags. In opposite to the categories tags do not support hierachies. They are usually more associative whereas categories tend to be rather static.
With the help of trackbacks blogposts inform each other about interrelated hyperlinks. They create a connection back from the referenced post to the one where the hyperlink is placed. By having trackbacks it is possible to create a technical two way connection between blogposts which are dealing with the same topic or at least between postings where one post is referencing to the other one. It helps the blog reader to see discussions in other blogs which have a similar content to the one they are currently reading. Beside own blogposts and trackbacks one can also write a comment to blogposts to interact with the author and other recipients. This could be done with an easy to use webform. Name, eMail address, optionally a webaddress and the comment itself is needed to leave the comment.
Newsfeeds can be used to receive new posts. This feature collects new content from several websites and gives an overview about what is new on websites the user is interested in. All blogs (Microblogs, Tumblelogs and Weblogs) offer RSS-feeds for their content. RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and aims to offer an easy way to keep up with new content in these blogs or integrate the content in other services. On- and offline applications, so called feed-readers help to organize newsfeeds and stay informed. It is not neccessary to visit all these websites by oneself, the Newsreader/Feedreader is doing that for you.
Blogrolls are a list of links to other blogs which is ususally located in the blog’s sidebar. They are not visible to users who are using feedreaders. Links in the blogroll are the most favourite blogs of the blogowner, which he thinks are worth reading or which he wants to be easily accessed by himself. (Ebersbach, A.; Glaser, M.; Heigl, R. 2008 p. 62f)

1. uniform resource locator [↩]

To get a clean differentiation between weblogs and other blogging tools the term “blog” within this work will be used as a class for Weblogs, Tumblelogs and Microblogging and includes them all. If the Term Weblog is used within this Text the full featured, traditional Weblog is meant.

Tabelle

The following visualisation shows the difference between a microblog (left) and a tumlelog or weblog (right). There is only one image for tumblelogs and weblogs even though they have different features, as the structure is usually the same (content and sidebar(s)).

Grafik

The newest form of blogs are microblogs. Within microblogs the user is limited to a small amount of characters. The most popular microblogging service at the moment is twitter¹. Twitter is a hosted microblogging service but there are also open source alternatives like status.net² and several microblogging services based on the status.netsoftware like identi.ca³. All these services limit the user to 140 characters per message. By reading this one might think it is like SMS⁴ on the web but there is a big difference. With SMS the sender decides who receives the Message. With microblogging you post to the web generally unless you protect your posts or send them directly to
one recipient. But in general ones microblog posts are public to the whole web. This means these two techniques have the limitation of characters in common but use different communication models. Schwalbe and Meyer discribed it as a combination of Flussers net dialogue and amphitheater discourse which is typical for the blogosphere. (Schwalbe, C.; Meyer, T. 2010, p. 44)

Figure 3: Communicationstructure in the blogosphere. Amphitheater -net-dialougue synchronisation by Schwalbe, C.; Meyer, T. 2010

While SMS is a one-to-one or one-to-some communication, a microblogging messages are one-to-many (unknown) users.

Figure 4: Different communication models in SMS and Microblogging

Some microblogging services allow to add different media but the most established services twitter and laconi.ca only offer text within the messages. Especially for twitter a lot of third party services are available to add additional features.

Figure 5: Screenshot Twitter.com posting interface 15.10.2010

A ususal microblogging message contains a timestamp and up to 140 characters. Microblogs are part of microblogging services where the user creates an account. Within this account you can upload a userimage and add some short information and a hyperlink. All this information will be shown on the users profilepage together with recent posts and linked images of the people this user follows. Every message has a permanent link. The users messages are available as RSS Feed.

Figure 6: Screenshot Users timeline http://twitter.com/ralfa 15.10.2020

1. http://twitter.com [↩]
2. http://status.net [↩]
3. http://identi.ca [↩]
4. short message service [↩]

Tumblelogs are systems which are something between a weblog and microblogging. In opposite to microblogging tumblelogs do not have to be within a tumblelog service even though they usually are. They can be stand alone systems with only one user. Within a tumblelog you can embed different media like youtube videos or flickr images as well as uploading your own content and write blogposts without a limitation in the amount of characters. Similar to microblog post tumlelog entries have a timestamp and content but they can also have a heading and you can write comments related to every single post. Tumblelogs have RRS-Feeds and permalinks like microblogging. Popular tumlelog services at the moment are tumblr¹ and posterous².

Figure 7: screenshot tumblelog http://jonas28.tumbl.com 19.11.2009

1. http://tumblr.com [↩]
2. http://posterous.com [↩]

Weblogs are content management systems which contain a lot of articles (news, posts, …). These articles are in a reverse chronological order, which means the latest article is on top. Each article has a unique url¹, so its easy to reference to each single post. In most cases the visitor is allowed to leave comments to the blogposts. If you reference another article within your own there will be an automatic hyperlink between these two articles, it doesn‘t matter if they are in the same blog or in different blogs. These connections are called pingback or trackback.

Each blogposts will contain a headline, some content and metainfo like author, a timestamp, tags (keywords) and categories. Most blogs have one or more sidebars which means the bloglayout has space available for aggregated metainformation like archives, list of used categories and tags. Clicking on a certain category, tag or month all related entries will be shown instead of the recent x entries.
Blogs are easy to use and do not need any programming skills. Compared to wikis most blogs are managed by one or a few authors (Mosel, S. 2005, p. 30) while wikis have several authors, like wikipedia. In most cases the ratio of external links in blogs is much higher than in wikis. Most blogs have a blogroll in the sidebar which references related or favored other blogs.
There are services which host weblogs like googles blogger² or wordpress³. Weblogs are also available as free, open source software to be installed on your own IT infrastructure like serendipity⁴ or wordpress⁵.

Figure 8: screenshot of a weblog http:// bettertastethansorry.com 19.11.2009

1. unified resource locator [↩]
2. http://blogger.com [↩]
3. http://wordpress.com [↩]
4. http://s9y.org [↩]
5. http://wordpress.org [↩]

To make sure that the reason to use blogs in education is based on scientific and/or didactical reasons instead of personal favours or technical circumstances one should think about the theoretical framework for the use of blogs. This will help you to set realistic expectations within the implementation of blogs into your learning/teaching arrangements and shows you whether the additional effort is worth it.
Deciding about using blogs for education will be easier if you know which theories and concepts are related to the different usecases. The following chapter will give an overview about theories and theoretical concepts which are related to the scenarios mentioned below. These are forms of learning like formal, non-formal and informal learning, constructivism and connectivism, lifelong learning and self determination theory, microlearning and mobile learning, Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” theory and the 90-9-1 principle.

To split up the forms of learning into three different ways is very common. They are usually divided into formal, non-formal and informal learning. (Council of Europe, 2000, p. 18) These different forms of learning are explained in the following parts.

It needs some aspects to talk about formal learning. Learning which usually takes place in an official educational institution and where goals, time for learning and the support is structured can be formal learning. It also needs the aim to be certified and learning should be directed to a target out of the view of the learner. (European Commission, 2001, p. 57) Usually these are schools and universities. They have a curriculum and timetables to be structured in terms of time and content. The successful completion of formal learning processes will offer you a broadly accepted degree.

Learning becomes non-formal learning if it takes place outside educational institutions and if it does not usually aim to be certified. Even though it might be structured in terms of time, content and learning support. From the learners perspective it is target orientated. (European Commission, 2001, p. 35)