Thursday, October 05, 2006

Blogs:The Course Communication Center

In reponse to Hally's comments i will either reiterate, clarify or move my thinking on as to why i am enthused by the "english120" blog. In my view interaction, collaboration, communication and community building are particularly important elements in improving the educational experience of adult distance learners. The use of a blog as a central point of contact for a module to be studied can assist in facilitating the four elements highlighted above.

Parties involved in this educational experience are primarily the teacher and the students, but additionally administrators and programme leaders are also an important part of the community and need to be involved at varying levels.

This blog attracted my attention, because it was the first blog of this type that I have found. As to whether this is the best or finest example of how to deliver this type of blog remains to be seen. What this blog does for me is to allow me to highlight the main principles and reasons as to why using blogs in this way could be an attractive proposition.

A blog has a number of attractive benefits.
1. 24/7 Internet Access
2. Easy to setup.
3. Good Initial Infrastructure
4. Modest level of HTML Knowledge to adapt infrastructure.

5. Easy for Blog authors to contribute
6. Easy for students to raise issues via comments
7. Blog Contributions and Comments are simultaneously emailed to blog group members. (not 100% sure on this, but all comments are coming back to me the author)
8. Resources: All course related material can be accessed from one simple interface. Documents, presentations, internet links, pictures, video, sound and multimedia applications if required.
9. Entire contents of blog can be printed off for easy reading away from the computer.


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