Abstract:

Blogs as an educational tool have flooded the Internet since their creation in 1994 with daily personal format. And its maximum diffusion was boosted from 2000 with the launching of English web companies that offered services for the creation of blogs without the need of computer programming knowledge. An Edu-blog basically consists is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries about educational topics. There are three categories in which Edu-blogs can be classified: professional blogs (where teachers show their experience in teaching knowledge and educational information), student blogs (developed by students who share their learning experience) and classroom blogs (usually collective, where the teacher participates together with the students to publish concepts, educational activities, etc.).

This paper will present the experience in the development of an Edu-blog on the subject of macroeconomics developed collectively by the university students of the tourism career and the faculty assigned to the teaching. The blog "Macroeco-Tour" has been designed to show conceptual approaches about the main macroeconomic objectives of an economy, oriented specifically towards the productive sector of "tourism".

Currently, as a result of a search for economic Edu-blogs in Spanish language, none blog with these characteristics has been located. The students have worked in groups about concepts related to country's productive capacity, trade balance, price stability and labor market, together with their direct relationship with the tourism sector. Conceptual inputs have been enriched with data on the contribution of tourism activity to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Spanish labor market, the analysis of the tourism satellite account and the economic factors that influence pricing in tourism products and services. This educational project, although it has been designed during a quarterly course of world economic subject, will be continued with new contributions in next academic periods. In order to constantly update the graphs of the evolution of the macroeconomic variables analyzed and to provide students of other tourism careers with a place of reference to consult the macroeconomic context for the tourism sector. The relevance of this experience is based on the motivation of tourism students to understand macroeconomic concepts associated with their future profession and the importance of the tourism sector in the Spanish economy.

Keywords:

ICT, Economic blogs, motivation, higher education, macroeconimcs, tourism.