(via David Davies)

The University of Warwick is giving every new student the opportunity to start a weblog hosted on their home-grown BlogBuilder system. It’ll be interesting to see what the take-up is once the new university term gets underway. I spoke to Steven Carpenter at the ALT-C conference and he told me that Warwick will probably let the system run for 12 months then they’ll tie it in more closely with their PDP e-portfolios. Perhaps Warwick might even decide that the student weblogs will actually be the e-portfolios, a bit like they’re doing over at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Cool…but here’s what I really want to know. How did they come to the decision that blogs would be a valuable learning tool for students? What were the questions they asked, and the answers they got? Where did they do their reserach? (BTW, Kaye Trammell is on to that angle…) What are their benchmarks for success? How will they evaluate the tool?

And most importantly, did they blog their process???

It’s weird but in two different conversations I had today the question came up about what it takes to get teachers to use blogs over the long term. I mean I’ve trained a lot of people on how to use Weblogs, and everyone thinks it’s really neat, but very few actually stick with it. I know that blogging takes more time at the outset, but the learning curve is definitely not steep, and it would seem a great way to organize materials and archive lesson plans at the very least.

Seems like the teachers that stick with it just get into the habit, somehow. It works for them on a level that allows them to do it 10 or 20 or 100 times until it just becomes a part of their practice. I would hate to go back to teaching without blogs…but then again, I’ve got way too much of a blogging habit to even think about doing something as silly as that…

I’ve always said one of the best parts of all of this is having had the chance to meet so many really smart and motivated educators, and now it looks like I’ll get that chance again. I just noticed that Helen Barrett and I are both presenting next month at the NJ Edge Conference. I’m doing my blogging shtick and she’s talking about e-portfolios. We’re even in the same track! Cool!
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