What is a blog?
A blog is an online journal, in which individuals can write entries, ordered by date, which they can share with others. Members of the site can comment on each others’ entries.
Using a blog in teaching
A blog can make an interesting learning diary by allowing students to keep a journal of their learning . Some students find that this activity offers a useful opportunity to reflect on their own progress. If necessary, students can restrict individual blog entries so that they are only visible to teaching staff and themselves. Alternatively, blog entries can also be made visible to all the other students in the site, or to the public.
Blogs can be particularly useful if students are working on individual projects and you want them to be able to follow the activities of the other students in their group. Students can be asked to blog regularly and read each others’ blogs. Students writing dissertations can be asked to blog to keep their research supervisor informed of progress.
Using a blog in collaboration sites
A blog can also be very helpful for researchers working on a collaborative project. Individual researchers can use it as a research diary, jotting down their findings so far, and reading entries by their colleagues.
Alternatively, research participants can be asked to blog about their experiences, providing a secure and permanent record of the research project. Again, people can can restrict individual blog entries so that they are only visible to the site administrators and themselves. By default, all blog entries are visible to the other site participants.
The Blogs tool in Sakai
The Blogs tool in Sakai works on a site-by-site basis. Entries that people write in one site will not appear in any other sites.
People will not be automatically notified by email about comments on their blogs, nor about new blog entries posted by others.
Blog entries do not display in the ‘Recent Activity’ tool on the home page of your site.