Abstract
While blogs are an established communication channel on the World Wide Web, their use in technology-enhanced education has only recently been gaining popularity. In educational settings, blogs can be used to facilitate the creation of a community of learners, to support students in exploratory learning, reflection of learning activities, and by instructors to follow learning progress and collaborative activities. In this chapter, we present the application of blogs in an undergraduate computer science course on software architectures and web technologies. We provide quantitative and qualitative analyses of blogging behavior and learning outcome data, and provide reflections along with some recommendations on using this Web 2.0 tool in higher education settings.
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Notes
- 1.
The first-person remarks in this chapter express the views of the first author, who was also the instructor of the three lab courses under analysis in this chapter.
- 2.
Note that quoted postings have been translated and partly slightly shortened.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was invited as an extended version of a paper (Derntl, 2008) presented at the IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age 2008. I wish to thank the conference delegates for their valuable inputs and discussions on the paper and presentation. This research was supported in part by the University of Vienna in the project “Technology Enhanced Learning” (SP395001). We would like to express our gratitude to Renate Motschnig for her support during the qualitative blog content analysis.
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Derntl, M., Mazzurana, T. (2010). Case Study on Student Blogs in a Blended Learning Course. In: Spector, J., Ifenthaler, D., Isaias, P., Kinshuk, Sampson, D. (eds) Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1551-1_19
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