Blogs and College Students

I thought this article was very interesting. It did somewhat surprise me that studies similar to this one have not really be done before. I would have expected many different people and agencies to have conducted similar researches based on the fact of how big blogging in the classroom has become. However, as mentioned in the article most of the studies focus on K-12 classrooms and do not touch upon college.

With that being said, however, I did find the results to be quite interesting. I did not really surprise me that no correlation was found between blogging and a reader's ability. This is because the students are utilizing the same skills whether they are reading and writing on a blog or reading in a text book and writing out the answers on paper to be handed it. I could very easily see how simply using a blog would not improve their scores.

However, it did improve their motivation in terms of sense of community and rapport with their peers. I think blogging in this sense does help to create a sense of community because it focuses on reading others' blogs and responding to it. In a regular classroom set up this interactivity does not happen all that often. Most of the time students are assigned questions from a book, they write out their answers and submit it to the teacher. No discussion on this assignment usually takes place. With blogging, everything is a discussion. You post your answers to a particular assignment and peers comment on it, bringing up points you may not have thought of before and a conversation begins. I think this is beneficial not only to form a sense of community but also in motivation to learn the material being taught.