Teaching Excellence Seminar
March 3, 2005

Is blogging at the university the latest fad or an innovative tool? Discover why Harvard is studying blogs and how scholars are using blogs in their classrooms and as online research tools, vehicles for collaboration and academic publishing, and sites for academic discourse.

I'm Susan Herzog, Information Literacy Librarian @ Eastern Connecticut State University. This blog is part of my blogging presentations.

Nota Bene: This blog is NOT a comprehensive collection on academic blogs and bloggers. It will be used for two faculty development presentations at Eastern Connecticut State University. If you stumble across this blog and would like to suggest a link, please e-mail Susan Herzog.

Academic Blogging
Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing.
"In the past few years, blogging has become something of a national pastime, and academics are becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we explore the role that blogging plays for academics both in and out of the classroom."

Academic blogging and literary studies
John Holbo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore in Crooked Timber.

Academic blogging and science
Paul Z. Myers, Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota, Morris in Pharyngula. "John Holbo is writing about something I’m interested in, but he’s managed to frame it narrowly enough to exclude me, so far."

Academic blogs
Andrew Jaffe, astrophysicist, Imperial College London, in Leaves on the Line.

The academic contributions of blogging?
Eszter Hargittai, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Department of Sociology, and Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University in Crooked Timber.

Academics and blogging
Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University in Crooked Timber. Asks and answers: If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?

Academics give lessons on blogs
Shola Adenekan, BBC News, January 23, 2005.
"Blogs are increasingly being used by academics and students."

Berkman Center fellow Dave Winer wants to get Harvard blogging:
Weblog pioneer preaches the gospel of blog
By Beth Potier, Harvard Gazette, April 17, 2003.

Birth of 28 New Bloggers
It's that time of semester again. Tonight I introduced blogging to my class of pre-service English and foreign language teachers.

Blog Assisted Language Learning (BALL): Push button publishing for the pupils by Jason M. Ward, American University Sharjah.
TEFL Web Journal Vol. 3 No. 1 2004.
Abstract: This paper examines the definitions of ‘weblog’, explains the weblog’s history and discusses how weblogs develop writing, reading and communication skills. The positive and negative potential of weblogs for language teachers is discussed, the use of weblogs in a writing class for non-native English speakers in the first year of university study is demonstrated, and feedback from these students is considered.

blog review assignment
Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen.
"Jill Walker has shared a blog review assignment for her class of 50 blogging web design students at the University of Bergen:

'I've had a few requests for the text and grading scheme for the blog review assigment I'm currently grading, so I've translated it into English, all the better to share it and hopefully contribute to this kind of assignment evolving further so I can improve it next time I teach this course.'

This is a great model for faculty looking for a structured assignment to have students get introduced to weblog features and writing styles. Her assignment includes a grading rubric too. It is modeled after another excellent assignment, Scott Rettberg's Blogs on Blogs Web review developed at Richard Stockton College. Via blogshop.

Bloggers in the Flesh
Scott Jaschik.
Inside Higher Ed: MLA 2004.
"Six academic bloggers at the MLA gather to ponder the significance of their texts and their media."

Blogging and Peer Review
In the chutry experiment by Chuck Tryon, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Literature, Communications, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Blogging and Presence Online
Barbara Dieu, EFL teacher and coordinator of the Foreign Language Department, Lycée Pasteur, Curso Experimental Bilingue, São Paulo, Brazil. "This booklet was created to illustrate and document the chat: 'Blogs and Presence Online' I gave at Tappedin on February 16th 2004 for for the TESOL EVOnline 2004 Session: Becoming a Webhead. I have structured it around the questions posted in the blog opened at http://yomar.bravejournal.com/entry/536

a) definition/contrasting/comparing blogs to forums, web pages, wikis
b) best blog providers
c) where to find and how to place add-ons like list of links, a tagboard / comment box, voice
d) how to make blogs collaborative and interactive
e) blog management in your everyday routine.")

Blogging and Tenure
In Pedablogue: A Personal Inquiry into the Scholarship of Teaching by Michael Arnzen, Associate Professor of English, Seton Hill University.

Blogging as a Course Management Tool
Jon Baggaley. The Technology Source, Michigan Virtual University.July - August 2003. "Blogging is on the rise at the University as an increasing number of academic and technical staff discover its liberating potential."

Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom
BlogTalks 2.0: The European Conference on Weblogs
Barbara Ganley, Lecturer, Writing Program and English, Middlebury College. Abstract: Undergraduate students in a group-blogging literature seminar epitomize the writings of Pierre Lévy on collective intelligence (1997) and Stephen Johnson on emergence (2001) through the formation of a strong, resilient learning collaborative in which multi-media work naturally blends into research, personal reflection deepens scholarly insights, and the students see themselves as crucial participants in their education. This paper will demonstrate how students become the course, using the interface as a way to “take over” as their own teachers, creating an “Other” of the teacher in a unique synthesis of online and face-to-face work; they narrate a different course than expected and, if as Roland Barthes notes that “narrative is a hierarchy of instances,” the students’ narratives in this course suggest that they are indeed evacuating—challenging—even these post-modern categories.

Blogging as Scholarship
Brian Weatherson, Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University in Crooked Timber.

Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of
Noah Shachtman. Wired News. June 06, 2002.
"One of the country's most respected training grounds for professional reporters has become the first school to offer a class on the 21st century symbol of do-it-yourself journalism."

Blogs @ Middlebury College
http://blog.educause.edu/hector/archive/2005/02/02/623.aspx
Hector Vila, Assistant Professor in Writing, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT. February 02, 2005. "We have a very interesting experiment going on at Middlebury College: three different writing teachers exploiting the best blogs can offer, while also placing the form on notice: we are moving beyond it! we need to move beyond it!"

Blogs as Teaching Tools
From blog.bioethics.net, The American Journal Of Bioethics Editors Blog.

Blogs in Education
Instructional Technology Center at the University of Houston—Clear Lake. "This page is designed to provide you some resources if you want to get started using blogs for yourself or with your students. The use of blogs in instructional settings is limited only by your imagination." Includes "Options for instructors using blogs" and
"Options for students using blogs in your courses include."

BlogShop 2.0
"This is the second iteration of our online, blog hosted, workshop about weblogs, or 'BlogShop'...The BlogShop includes some background information on weblogs, some suggestions for how educators might use them, and then some step by step, illustrated instructions for using the blog tool used here, MovableType.

Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs
An award-winning paper by Susan C. Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, Elijah Wright, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Abstract: Weblogs (blogs)—frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence—are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts.

Campus Communications & the Wisdom of Blogging
Syllabus 8/1/2003.
By Sarah Roberts, an IT analyst and supervisor of the Multimedia Project Studio in the Academic Technology Services branch of the Office of Information Technology, Duke University.

Chasing the Dragon's Tale - Research in Generational Technology Gaps & the Digital Divide. An award-winning blog by Paul Chenoweth, Web Developer at Belmont University and graduate student working toward his M.Ed degree with a focus on learning communities and online communities. "The 'tale' of the Dragon has much to do with observered differences in the acceptance and diffusion of technology within different generations here on the college campus. Each year, new students show up with an overall increased level of computer skills while some, particularly older, key faculty and administrators seem to struggle to keep up with the technology Dragon...generally speaking, just barely chasing the 'tail'. So, Paul is looking into technology gaps and the digital divide...attempting to get a handle on what that means, particularly as it impacts education."

Community Blogging
Stephen Downes. Stephen's Web. February 19, 2005.
"What I'm going to look at is the relation between community and blogging, how blogging becomes a community, how a community becomes a group of bloggers."

Confessions of a Scholar-Blogger
Daniel W. Drezner. The University of Chicago Magazine. February '05. Volume 97, Issue 3. "The writer, editor, and publisher of danieldrezner.com reveals how he balances his day job as an assistant professor of political science with his passion for electronic commentary.

Since becoming an assistant professor, I have authored one book, edited another, and published a respectable quantity of scholarly articles. And yet I can say with a fair degree of certainty that if you added up the number of people who have read any and all of these works, it would probably be less than the number of hits I receive daily on my Web log—an online journal I’ve kept for the last two-and-a-half years. That fact simultaneously exhilarates and appalls me."

Content Delivery in the Blogosphere
Technical Horizons in Education (T.H.E.) Journal.
By Richard E. Ferdig and Kaye D. Trammell, University of Florida
February 2004. Includes The Pedagogy Behind Blogs, Practical Suggestions for Implementing Blogs, and Four Benefits of Student Blogging.

Creating Community, On-line and Off
"John Harvard's Journal", Harvard Magazine, January-February 2004.

EdTechPost
Technologies for Learning, Thinking & Collaborating.
Scott Leslie, educational technology researcher and Manager of the BCcampus Learning Resources Centre, a multi-disciplinary 'open content' repository.

Ecce Holbo
An essay on academic blogging and bloggers by John Holbo in Crooked Timber.

Inside the ivory tower
The Guardian.
"Blogging is allowing academics to develop and share their ideas with an audience beyond the universities. But, as Jim McClellan reports, not everyone is convinced."

Into the Blogosphere
Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie A. Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman, eds. University of Minnesota. "A peer-reviewed, interactive journal on blogging; you are encouraged to post responses to the articles: This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others."

Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs. Sebastian Fiedler, Media Pedagogy, University of Augsburg, Germany. Abstract: Personal Webpublishing practices such as Weblog authoring have become increasingly popular for publication and collaboration on the Web. The ease of content publication and processing afforded by these systems allows individuals to transcend traditional authoritarian modes of learning to establish powerful modes of self-organized, collaborative learning. The changes wrought by these systems are already impacting many areas, and they are potentially very powerful for establishing truly "personal" support for individual and collaborative learning inside and outside of formal institutions. Empirical reports of research and design in this area are still rare, especially in the context of formal education settings. In this session, we intend to present empirical data on integrating personal Webpublishing into formal learning settings, as well as perspectives on applying and evaluating dynamics and characteristics of self-organizing learning networks among Weblog authors.

Lit Studies Blogging, Part II: Better breathing through blogging
John Holbo in Crooked Timber: "This is the follow-up to my previous academic literary studies and blogging post."

More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs
Stephen Downes. After 5. TeleEducation NB TéléÉducation. May 1, 2003. "In this editorial for the New Brunswick e-learning newsletter, After 5, I describe how the common conception of weblogs as the uninteresting personal rants of the disaffected has evolved into a powerful information sharing and community building tool. 'Because they tap into the heart of one of the web's great strengths, personal expression and control, and because they draw on the communication capacities inherent in an inter-network, they have become an effective means of distribution any digital content and at the same time a highly selective filtering and classification system for that content."

The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Viviane Serfaty. Amsterdam: New York, NY, 2004.
"The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practises created by Internet users in America."

Our Purpose, Revisited
Michael Arnzen in Pedablogue, A Personal Inquiry into the Scholarship of Teaching.

Scholars Who Blog
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
David Glenn June 6, 2003.
"The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics: Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio? In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in conversations with scholars who have taken up the habit of writing Web logs, or 'blogs'."

ALSO SEE:
A Blog Takes Off
From Nascar to Ugly Robes: Some Academic Blogs to Note
Colloquy Live: "Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and the founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, an academic blog, on issues facing scholars who have blogs.

Sharing Teaching Resources
By a literature professor in the Midwest who prefers to remain anonymous.

students teaching with blogs
Jill Walker, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. "One thing I've really liked in the student weblogs I've been grading is that there are a lot of posts that are really useful. It's so different from exams where only the examiners are ever going to see all the work students have done. For instance, a colour blind student teaches other students and readers how to design sites that can be read by colour blind people....Here are some things I did right, I reckon, in the blogging section of the course."

teaching critical blogging
Jill Walker, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. "Adrian emphasises process- and problem-based teaching, and his weblog has lots of notes about his teaching. Yesterday he wrote about the stages between a student asking 'What's the difference between a blog and a webpage' and the class finding information and assessing its validity."

Weblogs and Discourse
Weblogs as a transformational technology for higher education and academic research. BlogTalks 2003: The European Conference on Weblogs. Oliver Wrede, Department of Computer Science, Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

Abstract: "This paper discusses different questions of weblogs in context of higher education. It is focussing [sic] on three loosely coupled questions:

1. How can the weblog format improve discourse?
2. How it can weblogs support teaching at universities?
3. What are the institutional benefits of weblogs in universities?
It seems obvious that these questions relate to each other and therefore probably should be discussed in context. The document grew out of a wild collection of speculative thoughts and notes. It is also based on some daily experience with weblogs in an educational setting."

What I told the tenure committee
Miriam Jones, Assistant Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Languages, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada. "Here is a copy of a text I included among the myriad xeroxes [sic] and print-outs in my tenure file. I post it here for the edification of (or as a warning to) anyone else struggling with how, or if, to position their blogging within academe. I will post any updates if and when I receive feedback: On the Value of Blogging for an Academic."

When blogging gets risky
Bad-mouthing job leads to firings Amy Joyce, washingtonpost.com, Feb. 11, 2005.

why do academics blog?
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Associate Professor, Information Technology, and Director, Lab For Social Computing, Rochester Institute Of Technology, in mamamusings.

Flipping The Question: "Why Don't Academics Blog?"
Alan Levine, Instructional
Technologist, Maricopa Center
for Learning & Instruction in cogdogblog.

Working With Technology and Winning Tenure
The Chronicle of Higher Education.

you may ask yourself: how did i get here?
Elizabeth Lane Lawley in mamamusings.
"One of the questions I've been asked a lot lately, mostly by full-time academics, was how/why I started blogging. It's not a quick and easy answer, but I've been asked it enough now that it's probably worth having it here in a public and somewhat permanent form."

Using Blogs to Teach

bgblogging
Barbara Ganley, Lecturer in Writing, Middlebury College, blogs about her experiences as a writing instructor using technology. Links to her current class weblogs:
Creative Writing
Writing Workshop

See also:
Presentation Notes for CET Presentation on Blogging in the Liberal Arts: A Brief History of BG's Classroom Blogs & A non-techie writing and lit teacher turns to blogs in the fall of 2001. Why?
Pedagogical Underpinnings of Blogs in the Classroom

Blogging Across the Curriculum
Pattie Belle Hastings, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Interactive Digital Design Department, Quinnipiac University (CT). A course resource for the Interactive Digital Design Program, this site uses blogs as a substitute for traditional paper journals.

blogs and teaching
Jill Walker, University of Bergen, Norway.

EdBlogger Praxis
Albert Delgado, a Chicago public elementary school teacher (Whittier Elementary School, located in the Barrio of Pilsen). Find Examples of Educator Blogs Online. Participate and comment. Academic blogs included.

Educational Bloggers' Network
"Sponsored by the Bay Area Writing Project and Weblogger.com, the Educational Bloggers' Network (eBN) is a community of teachers and education professionals and supporters who use weblogs for teaching and learning. The network assists members to advance weblog integration in education."

Mission Statement
eBN is a collaborative of teachers and organizations using weblogs in education. Its purpose is to help its members, kindergarten through university, to access and use weblog technology for the teaching of writing and reading across the disciplines. The network provides a forum for educational professionals who use weblogs, an array of opportunities for teachers to continue their professional growth, and a framework for cooperation to deal with issues that affect the integration of weblog and other digital technologies into teaching and learning."

Emerging Technologies
Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration.
Bob Godwin-Jones, Virginia Commonwealth University.
Language Learning & Technology. Vol. 7, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 12-16.

FroshComp
Terry Elliott, Western Kentucky University.
"This is a freshman writing class using weblogs as an important tool for composition and publishing. We meet three times a week, but anytime online. Welcome to the ongoing experiment that all learning is, be it online or face-to- face."

How might I use a blog in teaching? from Collogatories, a project investigating and researching new learning arenas and emerging technologies.

Instructional Technology Group-Instructional Tools and Strategies, Emerson College. "The following guides: Extending the Classroom and Reflection, Motivation and Learning provide strategies for using blogs within the course community and for promoting individual interaction with students.

Assessing Student Weblogs and Evaluating Websites can help you look at blog posts in an analytical way and determine whether a web site meets your curriculum goals."

Reflections from an Instructor
Literacy & Technology Instructor's EduBlog.
"Lynne Jordan, Literacy Instructor at Georgia State University, is working with Anne Davis, Instructional Technology Specialist at GSU, to create EduBlog possibilities with pre-service teachers. This EduBlog was created to provide a sample of the project we have designed for using EduBlogs for Literature Circles."

Living in Parallel Worlds: Blogs and Course Management Systems
Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher and emerging technology analyst. eLearning Dialogue. 11/12/2003.

"As part of British Columbia's BlogTalk- Discussion on the use of blogs in education, Scott Leslie provided an excellent matrix" of potential uses of weblogs in education. The matrix features a coordinate system with dimensions of Student Blogs vs Faculty Blogs and actions of Reading Blogs vs Writing Blogs. Within each quadrant, he outlines examples on a continuium defined by the audience "For the Internet - For other students - for instructors - for self". Via blogshop.

music 1 - introduction to music
dan mitchell, music department, creative arts division, de anza college. "This web site contains resources and information for Music 1: Introduction to Music classes taught by Dan Mitchell. Students enrolled in these classes are required to use the site for access to course resources and assignments. Internet labs are available on campus for students who do not have outside Internet access."

Rhetoric and Democracy
"Welcome to the discussion and announcement site for Dr. Chuck Tryon's English 1101 courses at Georgia Tech. Class discussion will focus on the language and images used in political campaigns, focusing primarily on the 2004 presidential election. Visitors are welcome to leave comments and participate in the discussion."

Stacey's College Writing II Course Management Blog
Stacey Steinkopf's Weblog for Her Students, Bemidji State University.

Teaching With A Weblog: How To Post Student Work Online
Submitted to Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, May 14, 2002. Presented at the Nashville, 2002 conference (April 12, 2002). Timothy C. Johnston, College of Business and Public Affairs, The University of Tennessee at Martin. ABSTRACT: "Using a weblog (blog) as a class web page has the following features:

(1) A simple, easy-to-use, free web-based editor and free web page host server can be used, so no PC-based software programs (HTML editor or FTP) and no server accounts are needed, (2) students require minimal training to begin independently publishing work to the blog, and (3) the instructor’s workload to maintain the class web page is distributed to the blogger software and to the students. These features enable students to share their work with each other online, and make it available from and to any computer that is connected to the Internet. This paper explains how to use a blog for teaching:

(1) The reasons for putting student work online are discussed,
(2) the steps needed to initiate and manage a blog are described, and
(3) the advantages of a blog as compared with the traditional method of creating web pages are presented."

Uses of Blogs in Education
"The following 5 uses have been extracted from Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes in the Educase Review and from ADE Bloggers.

Weblogging: Another Kind of Website
Chris Ashley, Manager, New Program Development, IST/Interactive University. Berkeley Computing and Communications. Fall 2001.
"A growing community of educators and instructional technology specialists are already finding ways of incorporating weblogs into teaching, and are using weblogs as spaces to reflect on, share, and discuss questions and ideas about teaching, technology, and education in general. Some ideas for educational uses of weblogs include: teacher and student writing spaces for announcements, journaling, and assignments; web sites for student research, projects, portfolios, and assessment; teacher and student P2P writing and journalism for interactive learning within classes, schools and across distances; collaborative writing and planning spaces; and the notion of the difference between on-going, cumulative weblogs and weblogs built for a specific project, presentation, or resource."

Weblogs, Part II: A Swiss Army Web Site?
Chris Ashley, Manager, New Program Development, IST/Interactive University. Berkeley Computing and Communications. Spring 2002.
" The BC&C audience is not likely to know a lot about weblogs, even though Part I was published in fall 2001. My intention was to try to entice new users while providing a provocative overview for even reasonably experienced webloggers, and to tie together numerous uses for weblogs to create a coherent vision for ways that weblogs can push the Web's capabilities."

Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network
Jill Walker, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen
Talk at The Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG)

"Weblogs as an Independent Study Tool."
Aylward, M.L. (2004). Journal of Interactive Instruction Development 16 (4). Abstract: A limited amount of instructional contact time challenges university instructors to explore options for engaging students in purposeful and reflective learning outside of class time. The e-learning environment of Acadia University offers diverse possibilities for extending and individualizing the learning experience for students. Web Logs or “Blogs” have great potential for encouraging students to become skilled at researching and reflecting (Blood, 2000; Mortensen & Walker, 2002). This new web publishing platform offers multiple pathways for critical investigations of course related topics and issues. Students in a pre-service teacher education program utilized blogs in unique and creative ways to amplify their understandings of Inclusive Education. Six distinct approaches to blogging are identified, and recommendations are made for use of web logs to deepen comprehension of course content.

Weblogs at Harvard Law
Stephen Downes. The Technology Source, Michigan Virtual University.July - August 2003. "Potier (2003, p. 11) notes that Weblogs at Harvard Law was created, at least in part, to establish 'intellectual community' among 'the University's disparate schools and centers'. The initiative arose out of a November 2002 conference called 'Harvard's Emerging Digital Identity.' The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which sponsored the conference, now hosts the Harvard weblogs. According to Winer, weblogs are 'an incredible medium for sharing ideas and information'."

Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes
Aaron Patric Campbell, Ryukoku University, Seta, Japan.
"The purpose of this paper is to introduce three ways that weblogs can be used to support ESL classroom learning. After defining what a weblog is, I will proceed to show how weblogs can be put into immediate use in the ESL classroom by means of three distinct types: the tutor weblog, learner weblog, and class weblog. I will also mention the software available for creating and maintaining weblogs."

Weblogs in Higher Education
This blog / weblog is devoted to understanding the best pedagogical and other uses of weblogs and wikis in higher education.

Welcome to the Blogosphere:Using Weblogs to Create Classroom Community
Computer Writing and Research Lab. White Paper Series:#030822-1 from Thomas Nelson & Jan Fernheimer, University of Texas at Austin. August 22, 2003.
Abstract: This paper introduces weblogs ("blogs ") and their potential uses in the computer-assisted classroom, especially in composition and literature courses. First,we provide background and terminology on the evolution of blogs and blogging. Then,we consider the characteristics of blogs that appear to be relevant in classroom teaching,
including their interactive nature,their multi-author capacities,and their public presence. From these features we suggest numerous ways in which blogs might be used effectively in the CA classroom,as well as some potential problems worth taking into consideration.

What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs? from Common Craft by Lee LeFever.

When Blogging Goes Bad
Steven D. Krause. Kairos 9, no. 1 (Fall 2004).
Krause, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan University, reflects on his experiences using blogs in the writing classroom and his preference for using e-mail discussion lists.

Using Blogs for Research

blog research issues
Liz Lawley. June 24, 2004. Many-to-Many.
"During the several hours that Seb, Jill, Clay, Alex, and I spent in the coffee shop at the RIT library before our panel at MEA, we talked a bit about our frustrations with current academic approaches to social software, particularly blogs...I don’t think it makes sense to lump all research and observation about blogs together under one rubric. Right now, there are at least five different approaches to studying blogs that I’d like to see explored in more depth, and I suspect that readers here will add a few more."

Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool
Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker. An academic paper exploring the use of blogs in research on online communication and games by Torill Mortensen, Volda College, Norway, and Jill Walker, University of Bergen, Norway. They claim that “writing and the way we express thoughts change when you use different tools.”

Personal Knowledge Publishing and Its Uses in Research (1/2).
Sébastien Paquet. National Research Council of Canada.
Paquet, Research Officer with the National Research Council of Canada, provides an overview of personal knowledge publishing, an outgrowth of weblogs, and its functionality in communicating and collaborating for researchers.

Personal Webpublishing as a Reflective Conversational Tool for Self-organized Learning Sebastian Fiedler. Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003. May 12, 2003. Fiedler, Doctoral Student of Media Pedagogy, Universität Augsburg, Germany, suggests that “…personal Webpublishing technologies and practices can be conceptualized as a reflective conversational learning tool for self-organized learning. Beyond the examination of the theoretical basis for such a claim, initial ideas for specific learning environment designs on the basis of a ‘conversational framework’ are presented.”

PhDweblogs.net
"PhDweblogs.net is a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students' weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register it here. We also accept other research-related weblogs, even if they are not directly connected to a PhD."

research blogs
"This is an annotated list of weblogs I have found that are used by researchers and academics as a part of their research practice. I'm gathering these links to find out more about how blogs are used in academia and research." These links are collected and annotated by Jill Walker and published as part of jill/txt.

Directories of Academic Bloggers

Crooked Timber has a blogroll of academic blogs/bloggers by discipline (scroll down and look at the right hand side of the blog).

Professors Who Blog, maintained by Andrew R. Cline, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Southwest Missouri State University.