Educational Blogging

Tomorrow may have been optimistic. :)
CNN.com has an article on blogging, "Blogging goes mainstream". This article, together with one I saw linked to on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's page (excuse the lapse in grammar),has gotten me thinking about the role that blogs could play in education.

Since blogs operate like a publicly accessible journal or diary, blogs could replace jounraling in writing or first-year experience (FYE) classes. Digital diaries fit in well with the electronic portfolio initiatives taking shape here as well as at campuses across the country. Blog entries could form the reflective backbone of these e-portfolios and serve as a starting point for both assessment and evaluation by faculty, advisors, potential employers and graduate programs, as well as self-assessment by the student's themselves. There is potential that the diaries could form another facet to campus community life where the blogs could spawn discussion, both on- and off-line, and other interaction across the campus.

Blogging course projects and papers could offer an instructor an insight into the development and drafting process of a semester long project which would allow for a continuous stream of back-andf-orth comments and suggestions. The final blog would present a timeline for the project, offering a mulitangle view where instructors only see a single final draft. Blogging a group project would be a simpler version of the collaboration tools being developed by all the Office'style software makers. The group blog would be a central depository for notes and comments and even versions of documents. Not only could loss of files be prevented, but individual contributions to the group could be assessed.

One tradeoff would be the privacy that paper-based jounraling provides, assuming that students take advantage of this 'privacy' to relate personal thoughts that they would not wish to share with the classmates or the public. Since this is not important to most course projects, faculty could use traditional journaling formats.

My largest concern would be cost, in the larger, economic sense. What resources would be needed to set up the digital infrastructure? What training would faculty need? How can faculty be brought on board with blogs? How would students react? Would students need much training?