Value of blogs in preservice teacher education

Accompanying the popularity of blog technology as a dominant online publishing paradigm is a growing interest in its educational benefits. This paper sets out to understand the role of blogs in supporting a dispersed community of preservice teachers through content analysis of their blogs and comments. A model of the educational affordances of blogs is proposed to examine how blogs can support self-expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue on the part of student teachers. This paper revealed that the salient value of blogs centered on emotion-laden and social-oriented individual expressions and reflection. The interactive functionality of blogs was used mostly for exchanging social support rather than reflective dialogue.link_to_subscribed_fulltex