A STUDY OF BLOG USER ACCEPTANCE – USING CHANGHUA COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS AS AN EXAMPLE

Blog allows individuals to create personal webpages of text, pictures, graphics, videos, and other multimedia with the same ease as creating a word processing document easily (Erica Boling &Jill Castek &Lisa Zawilinski &Karen Barton&Theresa Nierlich, 2008). Furthermore,blog can be used as a tool to promote higher order thinking(Lisa Zawilinski, 2009). The value of using blog in education is a field still waiting to be explored. Changhua County Education Department has established a Changhua County Blog to promote teachers using blog as a completion of the goal in the educational policy to promote IT in education. The recent trend of blog has taken the world by storm, teachers use blog as tools of eportfolios and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) .
Purposes of this study are as follow: (1) Ascertain the acceptance of blog as a new technology by teachers in Changhua County. (2) Examine the influencing factors affect the acceptance of blog by teachers in Changhua County. (3) Examine the moderators that influence the acceptance of blog by teachers in Changhua County.
In the study of technology acceptance, user behavior intention and usage are used as determinants. This study used Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explore the acceptance of blog by elementary and junior school teachers in the upraising technology of Blog. This study examined the teachers’ acceptance of blogs through questionnaire survey method. A total of 283 valid questionnaires were obtained from active teacher bloggers. Statistical methods included descriptive statistics, factor analysis, correlation analysis, path analysis.
The result shown a congruency to the findings in UTAUT. Factors like self-efficacy, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions and functional capability are determinants of acceptance by teachers. Moderating factors like age, gender and experience played an important role in explaining the influences.
Many of the results in this study shown congruency to the technology acceptance model. Blogging tools are a now-day favorites for everyone with Internet access. It is a simple tool with fanciful functions embedded in just a few clicks away. In the world of competitive advantage, teachers are among the group who need to prepare themselves for any future evaluation on their teaching performance. We hope we can find better functions of blog to hold teachers’ thoughts of instruction, share their experience and knowledge and a channel of communication to anywhere across the virtual globe.