A review of literature that explores web-log usage

Blogging in Educational Settings

In this era of education many academic bodies have attempted to implement a blog in educational contexts to enhance the communication environment among students and teachers. This is due to an emerging dissatisfaction of CMC technology such as the blackboard system and Wikis (Johnson 2007). Shortcomings include lacking management of communication (De Bruyn 2004), lacking ownership (Penna-shaff et al. 2005) the lack of posting referred to as ‘lurking’ (Ocker & Yaverbaum 2001), being an instructor-centred system rather than a learner-centred system (King 1998) and having no archives where email users have to view long threads of discussions that are poorly organised (Treese 2004).

Through the emergence of blogs, educators and students alike, were able to overcome such limitations of CMC technology having the ability to: manage communication effectively (De Bruyn 2004), have a sense of ownership and control over postings, create a centralised learning experience where students were given ample freedom to discuss any issues concerning academia (Treese 2004) and view the histories of posts and discussions due to a chronological archiving system (Divitini et al. 2005; Lin et al. 2006; Penna-shaff et al. 2005). Further, the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) System included as a feature of blog spaces, no longer requires blog users to regularly visit any other blogs to check for updates because RSS technology automatically delivers a list of updated information to other bloggers that are subscribed (Montanez, 2006).

A study by Blackstone et al. (2007) reports on an innovative approach to the implementation of a cycle of blogging activities within different levels of courses in an English medium university in Japan. The study specifically focused on how a “blogging buddy’ system can be an effective means of facilitating greater learner interaction and reflection on development of skills. A Blogging buddy system is one which assigns each student a peer review partner to help with editing before a piece of writing is uploaded (ibid). Their findings from an attitudinal survey conducted over two semesters with eleven classes of 145 students demonstrate that the university students had extremely positive attitudes toward both blogging and the blogging buddy system.

There are also contradictory results associated with the effectiveness of blogs to enhance communication among students. For instance, a study (Lin et al., 2006) indicated that a blog technology successfully enhanced interactivity among students. Here, 31 students posted over 700 entries on the course blog, and the top 40% of active blog users shared approximately 80% of the total blog entries for the three-month curriculum. On the contrary, another study (Divitini et al., 2005) revealed that the blog implemented in the course was unproductive in terms of interactivity among students (e.g., total nine entries were posted on the blog for a one-year course). The only different condition between two studies was that Divitini’s study provided students with a communal blog in which everyone was allowed to post a comment or entry. It was expected that the shared-blog serves as a centralized system where students are required to go to the shared blog (i.e. hub site) to communicate with their peer students (Ibid). As a result, students in Divitini’s study may have become dissatisfied with the centralized system and less engaged in blogging activities as compared to the students in Lin’s study. Although both studies did not further investigate the effect of the shared blog, the shared space might be the determining influence for the students’ engagement.

Micro-blogging in Educational Settings

With the widespread use of social media by students and educators, micro-blogging has become one of the latest trends currently followed in educational settings. To explore the extent of micro-blog usage in education, a variety of studies have been carried out by many scholars.

For instance, A semester-long experimental study to determine whether using Twitter for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades, was conducted by Junco et al. (2011) which involved the participation of 125 first year college students. While using a 19-item scale to quantify student engagement based on the National Survey of Student Engagement, they used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models to assess the difference of students’ engagement and grades (Ibid.). The analyses of the results which were further supported by content analysis of the students’ twitter exchanges indicated that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities (Ibid.). Essentially, providing experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role.

Ebner et al. (2010) conducted a research study that was carried out on the use of a micro-blogging platform for process-oriented learning in Higher Education. Students of the University Of Applied Sciences Of Upper Austria used micro-blogs throughout their course. All postings were carefully tracked, examined and analyzed graphically and in tabular form in order to explore the possibilities offered by micro-blogging in education. The findings indicated that It is not the transfer of information or status messages that are crucial factors, but rather, the opportunity to be a part of someone else’s process by reading, commenting, discussing or simply enhancing it (Ibid). This also enabled them to conclude that "micro-blogging can help users to partially and virtually present and to be part of a murmuring community, that is working on a specific problem without any restrictions of time and place" (ibid: 98).

Similarly, a study conducted by Borau et al. (2009) analysed the usefulness of micro-blogging in second language learning using the example of the social network Twitter while describing how they used Twitter with students of English at the Distant College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They also analysed the students’ messages and show how the usage of Twitter trained communicative and cultural competence.