Academic blogging: pros and cons

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Nowadays, educators around the world constantly try to find new ways of improving their teaching styles and encouraging students for active participation in the learning process. One of such ways, which has recently gained its popularity among researchers and educators (Montgomery, 2015) is a usage of blogs in a classroom.  While there are definitely a great number of advantages for this approach, it is also important to consider some possible shortcomings of using blogs as a teaching tool. In this essay, I analyze several articles on using blogs as a means of teaching and reflect on my own experience of writing posts in the course of English for Research.

The advantages of blogs as a classroom activity are mainly associated with a more effective language acquisition (Warschauer, 1997). Indeed, in order to find an interesting topic to write about, students have to search for many different articles which contain useful vocabulary. Since writing a post requires them to write their thoughts in a lay language, it can make their writing style more “natural” and easy to follow (Montgomery, 2015, p. 3). Therefore, it can lead to another advantage, namely confidence in writing for audience. More specifically, writing blogs in the stage of the university can gradually prepare students for future endeavors of writing their own blogs or cooperating with other professional writers (Warschauer, 2010, p. 4). Moreover, students can have a chance to know each other better through a “many-to-many communication” (Warschauer, 1997, p. 473). This is, probably, one of the advantages I found the most useful because I had a chance to understand each person’s personality by analyzing their comments and posts.

Even though I truly believe that advantages of writing blogs are very prominent, some shortcomings of this approach for students and instructors do exist. First, since students’ posts are monitored not only by the instructor but also by their peers, it can put a strong “pressure” on them in choosing a relevant topic and transmitting ideas in an interesting way (Montgomery, 2015, p. 2). Moreover, some students may have different ideas on particular topics, which sometimes can be even controversial and sensitive for people to discuss (Montgomery). This can therefore lead to debates and even some constrains in communication among students since they will be cautious of talking with a person whose ideological, political or religious beliefs are totally opposite. One more disadvantage I found the most evident through our course is the “information overload” (Warschauer, 1997, p. 473). This can usually happen in large classrooms, where students are not able to read the posts of their peers due to its large scope in number. As a result, this can be not efficient in terms of students’ communication and exchange of ideas.

To conclude, even though blogging is a very creative and effective way of teaching and learning, it can be highly difficult for instructors to coordinate this process in a classroom. As for me, I enjoyed searching for interesting topics and sharing them with my peers. However, I was really struggling with finding time for actual writing of my posts since I had other tasks to do. Therefore, I suppose that if there hadn’t been so much pressure from other classes, I would have been more willing to write on the blog.  

References

Montgomery, D.P. (2015, April). Did you read my new post?: Improving autonomy, English and engagement through class blogs. Paper presented at The International Conference for Building Cultural Bridges, Suleyman Demirel University. Kaskelen, Kazakhstan: ICBCB.

Warschauer, M. (2010). Invited commentary: New tools for teaching writing. Language Learning & Technology, 14(1), 3-8.

Warschauer, M. (1997). Computer‐mediated collaborative learning: Theory and practice. The Modern Language Journal, 81(4), 470-481.