Case Study on Student Blogs in a Blended Learning Course

While blogs are an established communication channel on the World Wide Web, their use in technology-enhanced education has only recently been gaining popularity. In educational settings, blogs can be used to facilitate the creation of a community of learners, to support students in exploratory learning, reflection of learning activities, and by instructors to follow learning progress and collaborative activities. In this chapter, we present the application of blogs in an undergraduate computer science course on software architectures and web technologies. We provide quantitative and qualitative analyses of blogging behavior and learning outcome data, and provide reflections along with some recommendations on using this Web 2.0 tool in higher education settings.