Using Blogs to Facilitate Online Discussion

Abstract: Originally, blogs served as personal journaling tools. Recently blogs are more often applied to form online communities and thus expanded to more extensive uses in education. Little has been learned about the learners ’ perceptions of using blog to facilitate online discussion, nor of strategies for facilitating collaboration on blogs. This study investigates the effects of blogging on pre-service teachers ’ awareness of diversity in a literacy/reading context, and shares our experiences of facilitating the collaborative contributions of blogs. Need for the Study The Web has become an essential mediu m in the classroom because it supports asynchronous and synchronous communication, carries multimedia elements, and is easy to use. More and more applications are developed to increase the flexibility of web technology. For example, b logs have lured more and more users to share their thoughts in an informal way. The number of professional blogs has surged; however, research on how blogs could be integrated into learning, and their effects on learning, is scarce (Williams & Jacobs, 2004). This study investigates how educators can incorporate blogs to facilitate collaborative knowledge exchange in online learning environments. This presentation will discuss the pros and cons of collaborating via blogs, participants ’ perception o