BLOGGING WITH STUDENTS

Blogging has become one of the key ingredients of the so-called socials networks. This phenomenon has indeed invaded the world of education. Connections between people, comments on each other posts, and assessment of innovation are usually interesting characteristics of blogs related to students and scholars. Blogs have become a kind of new form of authority, bringing about (divergent) discussions which lead to creation of knowledge.

The use of blogs as an innovative, educational tool is not at all new. However, their use in universities is not very widespread yet. Blogging for personal affairs is rather commonplace, but blogging for professional affairs – teaching, research and service, is scarce, despite the availability of ready-to-use, free tools. Unfortunately, Information Society has not reached yet enough some universities: not only are (student) blogs scarcely used as an educational tool, but it is quite rare to find a blog written by University professors.

This communication explains the outcome of social-network experiences with teaching undergraduate students and organizing research communication events. We provide live, hands-on examples and interactive ground to show how blogs can be used to enhance the yield of teaching and research.

Impact of blogging and other social networking tools on the outcome of the learning process is very depending on the target audience and the environmental conditions. A few examples are provided and some proposals to use these techniques efficiently to help students are hinted.

This project is based on a very recent experience of using blogs with undergraduated students. More concretely we will focus in a experimental subject, Introduction to the Chemical Experimentation, where blogging was used to comment the lab workshops. Entries were based on different mistakes students usually perform at the lab. Student should comment which would be the best way to solve the problem they found.