Building blogs

Broaden mindscape with blogs

An Australian researcher has said that blogs on the internet help students think and write more critically, as they draw out people who would otherwise not engage in debate.

"The students are thinking more critically. They are learning to be responsible and they’re communicating outside the boundaries of the classroom and the institution, and they like that," ABC Online quoted Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, as saying.

According to Anne, in classroom teaching students mainly rely on the teacher as the main source of ideas and evaluation of their work, but blogs, which are interactive by nature, help them think for themselves and get different perspectives.

These web-based forums for discussing ideas, experiences or opinions allow students to discuss publicly what they are studying with other students and experts outside their own university, said Anne, adding that one of the most powerful facilities in blogs is pinging, which involves a person posting a comment about someone else’s work on their own blog.

"They are getting new perspectives that I can’t give them in a normal lecture. They get such a buzz when they make a comment on another person outside the boundaries of the institution and that person responds, or even gives them some further reading," she said.

Advantage of blogs over any other medium of internet communication is that it is not restricted by passwords, and as people are writing in public domain, they have to learn about plagiarism, copyright, privacy, ethics and defamation.b

"So they are absolutely savvy about that responsibility that they have and I get comments like ‘Oh God, I really have to think before I write’," Anne said.

Blogs also encourage broader participation in debates and are also extremely useful for categorising and managing a large collection of thoughts, whether they are from lecture notes, a student’s own ideas, or comments on the ideas of others.

Anne, however, cautions that one should always test the credibility or authenticity of bloggers before they read and check the resources they draw on. — ANI

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