Learning through blogging -- An Interactive way..!!

Blogging is helping students in many ways. It is helping them to think and write more critically and can help draw out students who would otherwise not engage in any sort of debate. Students are learning to be responsible and they are communicating outside the class boundaries and the school or institution. They are truly loving that.

Conventional Learning

In the normal and conventional type of teaching students more often than not rely on the lecturer as the main source of ideas and critique for their own work. This is not definitely helping them in bringing their own ideas out and in thinking in an innovative manner. This is where, blogs help students. They are interactive in nature. These web-based forums for discussing ideas, experiences or opinions allow students to discuss publicly what they are studying with other students and experts outside their own university.

Professors / Teachers should encourage their students to put their personal opinion in there, provided they are informed and backed up with evidence. Today, in a lot of field of academics like electronic or e-learning have their own blogs. So, students can engage directly with them.

Ping -- An important feature of Blogs

One of the most powerful facilities in web blogs is pinging. Pinging is a process which involves a person posting a comment about someone else's work on their own blog.

They use the 'Track Back' tool to notify the author when they have published the comment, basically inviting them to discuss it.It alerts the original author that someone has written about them. That's very powerful in the world of blogging.

Unlike other online networking at universities, such as email lists and intra nets, blogging is unique because it is public and not restricted by passwords.

Learning to be responsible

As students are writing in the public domain, they also have to learn about plagiarism, copyright, privacy, ethics and defamation. This is an important aspect and teachers / professors should concentrate on this point very strongly.

Students should also check for the credibility of the blogs and the bloggers before they actually go and learn from a blog post. If not, they may end up learning wrong things or they also end up in collecting information which is absolute waste. Hence, teachers should teach their students how to test the credibility or authenticity of bloggers they read and check the resources they draw on.

Debates Participation

Blogs also encourage broader participation in debates. If you had a group discussion in a class you're only going to get a couple of people saying something. This means she has no idea what the other students are thinking.But when they write on their web blog I can read it. They have a voice and the other students read it and respect it as well.

Blogs are also extremely useful for categorising and managing a large collection of thoughts, whether they are from lecture notes, a student's own ideas, or comments on the ideas of others.