Weblogs in Higher Education

Weblog ( also called online journal or diary) is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them usually with photos and links to other website that they find interesting.

Weblog in higher education plays an important role and have got lots of  values. The following  are some values of weblog in higher education. Weblog  provide educators with an assortment of new strategies for using hyperlinks, it helps student to be able to voice out what they think and be able to engage in some sort of dialogue with other individuals producing comparable stream of critiques, it  helps improve their intellectual when critiquing web materials, it helps to teach about specific genres( social, political), weblogs provide a useful antinode to classroom problems concerning plagiarism or to stimulate discussion on these matters, and when student access and use weblogs they gain distorted senses of the timeframe of academic production and of the nature of intellectual discourse.

Blog is a creative and a fun thing to do, since I have started blogging I love reading and I  have come to realise the importance of reading for at least 30 minute a day everyday. having a blog has encourage me to read a lots of interesting and educational blogs this include the blog of Johan Fourie about a-guide-to-your-first-year-at-university."(https://johanfourie.wordpress.com/2014/01/.../a-guide-to-your-first-year-at-university) this blog can be helpful to students especially those who are doing grade 12 and have decide to go to university the following year. blogging have improved my reading and writing skill. one of my experience  that I have learned with weblog is that you would not always get comment on your post other post would get comment and others would not but you must not be discouraged by that, you have to continuing writing and posting in your blog. I have also learn that in order to have lots of people reading and commenting on your block you need to link your social media pages ( Facebook, twitter, google+ etc) with your  blog in that way people would be able to access your blog.

Blogs can be improved by making sure that URLs(uniform resources locations) does not changes often because weblog that are not  maintained often have dead links and thus be less useful to readers  and makes it hard for student to have access to them, and they must make sure that they send notification to the blog owner before changing it URLs because other student have reason why there are gaps in the blogs and why they will no longer produce entries, one of  the reason would be day to day event that intervene to interrupt their blogging .They should introduce a blog where student can be able to engaged in a group discussion and every person be able to write  his/her own views.

weblogs is useful tool in higher education, they have good values and taught a lots of skills to students.

REFERENCE

Oravec, J.A. (2003). Weblog as an Emerging Genre in Higher Education. Journal of Computer in Higher Education, 14, (2), 21-24

 HORNBY, A. S., (2010). Oxford advanced learner's dictionary of current English. London, Oxford University Press.