How you SHOULD use blogs in education
Following on from how NOT to use blogs in education this post attempts to summarise this paper and add a few extra angles onto how you can use blogs effectively in education and invites your additional hints, tips, criticisms & wotnot.
You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course – This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…
You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion – One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation and subversion. Never, ever, mention number of words!
You should use blogs for what they are good for – Blogs are by no means the answer to everything, they are very strong alternative communication tools but if you want to build quizzes, run polls, have near-synchronous conversation, do listserv-y kind of discussion or strictly manage just about anything then you’ll probably want to look at another tool. Use blogs to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.
Use proven and effective blogging tools – When you decide to set off on your blogging journey don’t, please don’t, do it with some ‘tacked on solution’ to a large and established Learning Management System. Blogs are just as complex as any other form of software and you want to get the tools off people who know what they’re doing. You probably wouldn’t pick up an office suite from Macromedia, would you… Look at all the options and chose a proven path, there are lots of them.
on 
on 
on 
on 
on
I have really enjoyed these recent posts about blogs in education. Although I am not a student or a teacher, I am a mother and have found blogs to be a useful tool with my children. We have two ‘educational’ or ‘interactive’ blogs that we use on a weekly basis with them.
One is thepostcardproject.com, which my eight year old started last year. He got a map for his birthday and wanted to learn more about the places on it. We asked for postcards and he gets a few new cards each month. We research the people and customs of the area and post the card online. This blog relies on the participation of others [sending in cards], so the posting is sporadic.
The second is ninesidesofsunday.blogspot.com. It functions as a photo meme for the kids. Each Sunday, I give the kids [we have 7 at home] an assignment and they have to take and edit the pictures themselves. I have found that this is an effective way to get them thinking about their surroundings.
I imagine that these types of blogs would work well in an educational setting.
how about just leave it in the hands of the kids/students – just make them aware of proper guidelines for publishing on the internet, and what the consequences can be…
But then what would I do for a living