Understanding and Facilitating Student Bloggers: Towards a Blogging Activity Model

Since instructors have started recognizing the potential of Web 2.0 integration in web-based courses, blogs have been used to provide students with means of virtual communication, contribution, collaboration and community building. In this paper we aim to take another step forward by presenting and analyzing the integration of student blogs in an undergraduate computer science course on software architecture and web technologies: we implemented an LMS extension that acted as a course blog portal by collecting and displaying feeds of externally hosted blogs and logging usage data. Data analysis reveals that students who perform better academically also tend to participate more actively in the course blogosphere. Subsequently, we propose a blogging activity model, which aims to reveal and explain relationships between blogging activity variables--including peer visits, commenting and posting--to achieve a better understanding of lively blog communities in courses.

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