Welcome to the ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Blogging. The guide is designed to help you know what to expect of blogging’s abilities and limitations, where it fits in the broader context of teaching and learning in higher education, and how to approach implementation. Each section can be used independently to accomplish specific goals, or all units can be used together for a comprehensive process guide.

For printing and saving, each of the sections is offered in PDF format. In addition, you can download a PDF of the complete guide [PDF 2,378 KB].

Access to the Guide to Blogging, like other ELI Discovery Tools, is a benefit of your institution's membership. Please feel free to forward it to anyone else at your institution who might find it useful. And we hope you will let us know what you think of the guide—drop us a note.

The ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Blogging was developed by Elisa Coghlan, Justin Crawford, Julie Little, Cyprien Lomas, Marilyn Lombardi, Diana Oblinger, and Carie Windham.

What is it?

This section of the guide presents “7 Things You Should Know About Blogs,” a simple, brief overview of how blogging works; its significance and implications for teaching and learning; as well as its limitations and how it may evolve in the future. It is drawn from the ELI 7 Things You Should Know About... series. Download a PDF of this section [PDF 73 KB].

7 Things You Should Know About Blogs

Scenario

Professor Thomas has been looking for new ways for students in her International Politics course to connect—with her, with one another, and with the material. Knowing from experience that reflecting on concepts and writing about them helps crystallize her thoughts, she decides to experiment with blogs. Blogs are personal online journals that serve to capture thoughts and comments and post them to a public Web site for others to read and respond. Blog entries can be informal and are posted without the approval of a moderator or editor.

She gives a brief demonstration of the blogging application, showing the students that it’s quick and simple to create an entry. Going to her blogging application, she types in her comments, includes a link to the related article online, and adds minor formatting. With a single click, the entry is posted to her blog online.

Each student creates his or her own blog. Dr. Thomas instructs the students to set aside regular time for blogging, encouraging the students to write about topics discussed in class and how events in the news inform their understanding of global politics. She tells the class to read each other’s blogs, as well as her own, and to comment on the postings. In her own blog, Dr. Thomas models the kinds of blog entries she hopes students will write, and many of her entries are her responses to student blog posts.

As the course proceeds, she finds that most students take to blogging. When she uses a student blog entry to seed a posting on her own blog, she generates much more interest among students than had been possible in previous years. The trackback feature allows Dr. Thomas and the students to reference individual blog posts, similar to an informal literature citation. She also enjoys the community dialogue that results from others’ commenting on her postings—or challenging them.

By the end of the course, Dr. Thomas sees that introducing her students to blogging is a straightforward and interesting way for them to generate, share, and keep up with timely and topical class information. They form rich connections with one another and the content and—because of the reflection and sharing—find great relevance in the material. Several students continue to blog after the course is over. Dr. Thomas plans to include richer media, such as photographs and short audio segments, in the blogs in her next class.

What is it?

A blog—a shorthand term that means “Web log”—is an online, chronological collection of personal commentary and links. Easy to create and use from anywhere with an Internet connection, blogs are a form of Internet publishing that has become an established communications tool. Blogging has evolved from its origins as a medium for the online publication of personal diaries to a respected vehicle for editorials on specific topics. In their latest incarnation, blogs represent an alternative to mainstream media publications. The personal perspectives presented on blogs often lead to discourse between bloggers, and many blog circles generate a strong sense of community.

Who’s doing it?

Although online journals have been around longer than the term “blog,” they gained momentum with the introduction of services that allow users to publish blogs easily, without needing to code HTML. Today, thousands of people use services including Blogger and Moveable Type to simplify, automate, and accelerate the online publishing process.

Blogs are showing up in venues ranging from entertainment and commerce to news and politics. Many blogs are the musings of a single author; others focus on a particular topic and feature the voices of several authors. There are group blogs, family blogs, community blogs, and corporate blogs. WarBlogs (a product of the Iraq war), LibLogs (library blogs), and EduBlogs (targeting education) are just some of the emerging types of blogs. In educational settings, faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, to promote dialogue in the discipline, and as an instructional tool, and students are increasingly using blogs both as personal commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.

How does it work?

A blog can be thought of as an online journal, and maintaining a blog is as simple as using an online e-mail program. Bloggers enter posts into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, and save the post. The application adds the entry to the blog, making the content available online and alerting users who have subscribed to that blog’s content. Entries can include text, hyperlinks, images, or multimedia. Visitors can read postings, submit com3 ments, find blog entries by date, and search the site by keyword. Most blogs allow visitors to subscribe using an RSS feed or another service. Effective blogs tend to be updated on a regular basis.

Most bloggers solicit feedback, fostering two-way communication between readers and authors. Readers can provide feedback by leaving comments on the blog page itself or by posting a response on their own blogs and linking back to the original post—a feature called trackback. Trackback notifies bloggers when one of their posts is referenced by another blog, making it possible to determine the popularity of a post based on the number and diversity of incoming links to a post. Through linking, commenting, and feedback, good (or at least popular) ideas spread quickly through the informal network of blogs (the “blogosphere”), while unpopular ideas are simply ignored. Being referenced by a popular blogger brings instant attention and often credibility, and repeated linking enhances the reputation and authority of a blogger. Through this system of recommendations and referrals, a collaborative filtering capacity has emerged in the blogosphere.

Why is it significant?

Because blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, reflection, and debate, they often attract a large and dedicated readership. Blogs are becoming an important component of the Internet landscape, providing authors and readers with an avenue for unedited expression, reaction, and connection, without the censorship of mediated chat rooms or formal media outlets.

The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means that open discussions can be established almost immediately, making blogs an ideal venue for far-reaching discussions among the Internet community on new or timely topics. Blogs foster the growth of communities, and the dynamics of collaborative filtering and recommending/referring may provide new ways to evaluate, vet, and critique student-created knowledge.

What are the downsides?

Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individuals, they can include biased or inaccurate information. Users visiting a blog might see it as factual or authoritative when, in fact, it is the online equivalent of a soap box: a place to speak and to be heard. Unlike chat rooms, blogs are unmediated and therefore offer a different type of venue for individuals to express themselves and air their opinions, ideas, and attitudes. While this may be acceptable for a personal blog, it might be inappropriate for a blog hosted on an institutional server. Intellectual property is another area of concern for higher education, given the implications of hosting blogs that might include content that has been used without proper attribution.

Blogs are also highly volatile. Bloggers can edit or delete posts, and this transient nature can make blogs difficult to archive or index. In addition, the time-limited relationship of students to institutions influences the length of time a student blog should be hosted, yet removing posts from the blogosphere once a student has graduated could confound those who linked to the post.

Where is it going?

Blogs are proliferating at an exponential rate. Estimates suggest as many as 50 million people are now blogging. Because blogs are easy to create and modify, they occupy a unique niche in cyberspace—that of highly personalized discussion forums that foster communities of interest. Blogs are public and long-lived, and they weave themselves into close relationships with other blogs. As such, they may serve as an educational tool for reflection, knowledge building, and sharing.

Blogs continue to benefit from several years of experimentation and evolution, both within and outside of education. By carefully evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, educators are learning to set guidelines and expectations to maximize the benefits of blogs. Structured exercises and clear goals are further enhancing the value of blogs in education.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Put into practice with an understanding of their benefits and limitations, blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology tool. Blogs can be used for reflection about classes, careers, or current events; they can also capture and disseminate studentand faculty-generated content. RSS feeds make blog content accessible through newsreaders, allowing bloggers to increase the sharing of this information among interested individuals.

Blogs offer students, faculty, staff, and others a high level of autonomy while creating a new opportunity for interaction with peers. Blogs provide a forum for discussion that goes beyond coursework to include culture, politics, and other areas of personal exploration. Students often learn as much from each other as from instructors or textbooks, and blogs offer another mechanism for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and acquisition.

What are others doing?

How are colleges and universities using blogging? This section of the guide presents case studies of three institutions—Central Queensland University, Middlebury College, and the University of British Columbia—as well as brief information about a number of other institutional efforts. Download a PDF of this section [PDF 609 KB].

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What do students think?

See blogging from the student perspective in this section of the guide. In “Reflecting, Writing, and Responding: Reasons Students Blog,” graduate student Carie Windham discusses her own involvement with blogging and the views of other students. In addition, Justin Crawford talks about the launch of a student-run campus news blog in “The Campus Press Blogs.” Download a PDF of this section [PDF 296 KB].

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How do I get started?

If you are thinking about introducing blogging as a tool for teaching and learning, this section will highlight important considerations. It puts blogging into pedagogical context by showing where it fits in the spectrum of instructional technologies and pointing out issues of importance to faculty. It also simplifies the planning process by discussing how to present the idea to stakeholders and by highlighting critical implementation questions. Download a PDF of this section [PDF 1,237 KB].

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How do I know if it works?

As with any instructional technology effort, it is important to set up mechanisms for measuring blogging’s effectiveness. This section of the guide discusses areas you should consider for assessment and highlights some valuable methods. Download a PDF of this section [PDF 67 KB].

Assessment and Evaluation Strategies

Assessment can help you identify what a project has accomplished, what worked well (and what didn’t), whether there were any unintended consequences, and where to improve. As you design and execute your project, there will be several opportunities for assessing it and its impact on student success. This unit provides some suggestions.

Assessing the Overall Project

For the project to continue, it must provide value and be supportable. Consider using focus groups, observations, surveys, interviews, and faculty reports to better understand faculty and student perspectives. Your questions might focus on areas such as the value added, training, support, access, hosting solution, and so on.

Whether you use Web-based tools or use a campus-hosted blogging service, questions that explore faculty and student experiences might include:

What worked? What didn’t?
What were your challenges?
Where can improvements be made?
Did blogging add instructional value?

Questions for students who read or post to individual or group/collaborative blogs might include:

Did using blogs help you reflect on your learning? Your experiences?
Did blogs help you better develop your critical-thinking skills?
Was the blog writing you did more useful than other writing assignments, such as term papers?
How useful was reading others’ blogs?
Did you have the support you needed to use the blogging tools?

Questions for faculty might include:

What feedback have you received from your students?
Did the use of blogs support your intended instructional objective(s)?
Was the effort worth the benefits provided by blogs?
Did you have the technical support you needed for the project?
Do you have plans to use blogging in the future? If yes, how?
Is there anything you would like to do next time that you are not doing now?

In addition to faculty and students, central and departmental IT units should be included in the project assessment. Noticeable increases in help desk calls or network activity may need to be addressed if the project continues or scales up. Some questions to consider include:

Did the help desk experience an increase in requests for assistance from students participating in the project? From faculty?
Did networking staff note any impact on the network?
Did the computer lab staff observe an increase in requests for student assistance?
What were the most common problems?

An obvious indicator of project success is how much the blogging service is used. With aggregation and Web-analysis tools, campus-based hosting services can document the number of blogs, entries, comments, tags, images, audio/video attachments, and authors, as well as aggregate the day’s current posts and create directories to campus-based blogs. For example:

UThink (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/), the University of Minnesota Libraries blog service, provides statistics on the numbers of blogs, entries, comments, and authors, along with links to recent images, active blogs, and blogs with most entries and/or comments.
Warwick Blogs (http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/) at the University of Warwick collects information on what people are writing about, photos they are taking, or media they are reviewing.

Measuring the Impact on Learning

As noted in the “How do I get started?” section, technology alone will not improve learning. However, access to technologies that enable new activities can support the learning process. As you consider what you hope to achieve, also consider how you will assess the impact of blogs in areas such as content mastery, technology skills, student skill development (such as communication, critical thinking, reflection), convenience, impact on learning, and impact on reflective thinking.

Before you began using blogs, you probably asked a series of questions exploring student technology skills, access to software and hardware, and comfort with blogging. You can gain additional information by conducting formative assessments as you go—questions that help you improve the project as it progresses. The simplest approach might be to periodically ask students if they have changes to suggest that could make blogging more valuable to their learning. Depending on your goals, you might also want to track changes in attitude, understanding, and comfort with the process of blogging and the software or blogging service used.

For summative assessment, or end-of-project measures, solicit faculty input on their observations of student learning, asking questions such as:

What were your original learning objectives for using blogs? Were they met?
What was the level of student engagement in posting to their blogs? Commenting on other’s blogs?
How often did students enhance their text entries with links to other Web-based resources or image, audio, and/or video attachments?
What were the strengths of blogging? Weaknesses?
Were there any unintended outcomes?

Summative assessment is also useful for measuring student experiences such as ease of using blogs or usefulness/value for learning. A Likert scale can be helpful in gauging differences in student experiences. For example, the following questions could be posed:

I posted to my blog [rarely] [sometimes] [often].
I commented on classmate’s blogs [rarely] [sometimes] [often].
I incorporated links to other Web-based resources in my blog posts [rarely] [sometimes] [often].
I incorporated images, audio, and/or video in my blog posts [rarely] [sometimes] [often].
Blogging was valuable to my learning [not at all] [somewhat] [very helpful].
Blogging was a convenient way to enhance my learning [disagree] [neutral] [agree].

Consider using open-ended questions as well, such as:

What did you learn from posting to your blog?
What did you learn from commenting on others’ blogs?
What are the strengths of blogging? Weaknesses?
What aspects of the blogging did you find to be effective for your learning?
How could blogging be improved to make your learning more effective?

Authentic Assessment

There are as many types of blogs as there are forms of writing—from research, book reviews, and news reporting to creative writing, journaling, and opinions. Regardless of how you might use blogs for instruction, the process can be intimidating for students. Therefore it may be helpful to ask them to read and reflect on existing blogs as an introductory activity.

In his blog, 2 Cents Worth (http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/), David Warlick assembles a list of questions called “Blog Whats?” that students ask of blogs written by someone else. These questions are designed to help them focus on the content as well as the process of blogging:

What do you think is important about the blog entry?
What are the different sides in this issue?
What does the author want readers to know, believe, or do?
What else would you say about this blog entry?

People posting to Warlick’s blog also suggested these questions:

Is the author’s entry appropriate to the topic and the audience?
Does the author clearly state his case?
What sources are used, and are they properly linked?
What do you know, believe, or want to do after reading the blog?

And, as students begin blogging, ask them to reflect on their writing:

What experiences or insights have you shared that make this entry unique?
How will you generate feedback from your readers?
Are you upfront about your biases?
How do you want to make your readers feel?
What are you doing to make people come back to your blog? Do you care or should you?

The same questions students ask of existing blogs could be restated for instructor evaluation of student blogs:

What is important about the blog entry?
Are both sides of the issue covered?
What else needs to be said?

Rubrics can define the assessment criteria for student blogs. Determine the categories you want to assess (such as content, accuracy, visual appearance, resource links, and so on), and then identify the specific criteria for each category along with performance levels (see Table 1). Communicate your expectations by posting the rubric for students to review in advance of the assignment.

Table 1. Sample Criteria for Determining Effectiveness of Blogs

Category	Criteria	Performance Levels (with examples)
Content	Organization of thoughts, use of interesting details	Excellent: Consistently maintains content focus, adding interesting details Average: Reasonably maintains content focus with some interesting details Needs attention: Needs to clarify content focus
Accuracy	Vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, adherence to copyright guidelines, appropriate length	Excellent: Proofreading is thorough, with correct spelling and punctuation throughout Average: Some distracting errors; needs more thorough proofreading Needs attention: Frequent spelling, punctuation, and typographical errors; little evidence of proofreading
Visual Appearance	Banner, images, background, font colors	Excellent: Unique banner, images, background, and font colors representing a well thought-out design Average: Good selection of banner, images, background, and font colors Needs attention: Little evidence of consideration to design
Resource Links	Integration of other blogs, Web sites, images, video, audio	Excellent: Integrates links to relevant Web sites, other blogs, and media into blog posts Average: Connects to other resources on occasion Needs attention: Little evidence of links to other resources

While the design, implementation, and analysis of assessments takes time, the results will help you improve your project and extend the role blogging can play in teaching and learning.

Where can I learn more?

This section provides a number of helpful blogging resources, ranging from background information to support considerations. Download a PDF of this section [PDF 217 KB].

General Information

Background

These sites offer general discussions about the use of blogging for teaching and learning:

Steven Downes, “Educational Blogging,” EDUCAUSE Review 39, no. 5 (September/
October 2004): 14–26, http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp: A thorough overview of the development of blogs and their use in teaching and learning, their benefits and challenges, and commonly used blogging tools.
Blogs for Learning, http://blogsforlearning.msu.edu/: A Web site run by Michigan State University offering articles, case studies, tutorials, and other resources for instructional blogging.
Scott Leslie, “Matrix of Some Uses of Blogs in Education,” October 9, 2003, EdTechPost, http://edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2003/10/09/Matrix-of-some-uses-of-blogs-in-education: A matrix showing some of the potential educational uses of blogging.

Examples

A variety of exemplary blogs in higher education and beyond are accessible through the links below. For more higher education examples, see the “What are others doing” section of this guide.

Blogging: Select Higher Ed Blogs, http://academic-blog.blogspot.com/: A collection of links to examples of blogging in a variety of higher education settings.
CNET News.com Blog 100, http://news.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.html: CNET’s handpicked list of top blog sites in a variety of technology-oriented topic areas.
The Edublog Award Winners 2006, http://incsub.org/awards/2006/the-edublog-awards-2006-winners/: Highlights the international teaching and learning community’s top picks for group blog, individual blog, individual post, and several other blogging categories for both K–12 and higher education.
Guardian U.K.’s Weblogs We Like, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/special/0,10627,744914,00.html: Links to blogs from across the world on a wide range of topics, from news to technology to culture.

Implementation

Basic Guidelines

These sites cover the practical basics of blogging, from setting up an individual blog to blogging services available for institutional use:

Mark Glaser, “Your Guide to Blogging,” May 16, 2006, MediaShift, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/05/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_bl.html: Basic information for blogging beginners, including a description of what blogging is, common terminology, how to get started, and how to find other blogs.
Blogging to Enhance Learning Experiences, an online forum facilitated by SCoPE (February 12–15, 2007), http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=400: Online moderated forum on educational blogging, with helpful discussions covering a number of practical topics and common questions, including getting started with blogging, blogging software, and student perspectives.
The Giant Blogging Terms Glossary, http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/06/the-giant-blogging-terms-glossary/: An exhaustive list of the terms used in blogging accompanied by definitions, plus links to other blogging basics.
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else), Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 31, 2005, http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php: Tips for protecting privacy and freedom of speech when blogging.

Blogging Services

The following are some of the blogging services commonly used in higher education and beyond:

Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/
Drupal: http://drupal.org/
Edublogs: http://edublogs.org/
Elgg: http://elgg.org/
mo'time: http://www.motime.com/
tBlog: http://tblog.com/
LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/
Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.org/
TypePad: http://www.typepad.com/
WordPress: http://wordpress.org/
Blog Software Comparison Chart, July 14, 2005, USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm: Helpful chart comparing functionality, design tools, the publishing interface, spam-fighting features, and extras (like moblogging or photo galleries) across a variety of free blogging services.

Blog Search Engines

The following are two of the more prominent blog search engines for searching hundreds of blogs and blog posts by keyword or topic. Functioning the same as basic search engines, these services search the Web and index blog posts. Blog owners can also submit their sites to these services to increase visibility:

Technorati: http://technorati.com/
IceRocket: http://www.icerocket.com/

RSS Readers/Aggregators

RSS readers and aggregators are software clients or add-ons that facilitate subscribing to the posts of one or multiple blogs:

Your Guide to RSS, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_rs.html: Helpful basic information and tips on RSS.

Following are some of the more commonly used RSS readers:

NewGator/NetNewsWire/FeedDemon: http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/Default.aspx
NewsFire: http://www.newsfirerss.com/
Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/
Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
Sage: http://sage.mozdev.org/

Readers are built into these personal portals and others:

My Yahoo!: http://my.yahoo.com/
Windows Live: http://www.live.com/

Blog Enhancements

The following pages list some blog add-ons that can expand the functionality and add to the personalization of blogs:

WordPress Widgets: http://widgets.wordpress.com/
Blogger Add-Ons: http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=8931
Yahoo! Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/

Photoblogging and Moblogging

These links demonstrate the shape that these two varieties of blogging can take:

Photoblogs.org, http://www.photoblogs.org/: A portal that includes links to photoblogs (photo-based blogs) as well as how-to information.
“Moblogging Projects,” February 13, 2006, Blogging Pedagogy, http://pedagogy.cwrl.utexas.edu/?q=node/28: Brief information about moblogging (blogging from a mobile device) and two examples of its pedagogical use.

Support Considerations

Faculty Perspectives

The sites below present views of several faculty on the use of blogging to support learning in higher education:

bgblogging, http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/classroom_blogging/: Posts on classroom blogging from Barbara Ganley, Middlebury English professor and longtime user of blogging for teaching and learning.
Kara M. Dawson, “Blog Overload,” January 30, 2007, Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/01/2007013001c/careers.html: An alternate perspective of blog use for teaching and learning, presenting a brief and personal look at some of the challenges as well as tips for increasing their efficacy.
“Interactivism: Implementing and Integrating Blogs in the Classroom,” May 31, 2007, Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies, http://facultyacademy.org/blog07/interactivism-implementing-and-integrating-blogs-in-the-classroom/: Podcast of a panel discussion with Laura Blankenship, Susan Fernsebner, and Angela Gosetti-Murrayjohn, three faculty who use blogging for teaching and learning.

Student Readiness

These sites highlight student expectations, abilities, and needs regarding instructional technology, with a focus on blogging:

Karl Fisch, “Blogging: In Their Own Words,” June 16, 2007, The Fischbowl, http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/06/blogging-in-their-own-words.html: Video of high school students talking about using blogging for learning, whose perspectives hold value for the college and university setting as well.
Jennifer Sullivan, “Blogging from a Student’s Perspective,” February 12–25, 2007, posts to the forum of the Blogging to Enhance Learning Experiences event, http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=429: Several postings by students about their views of blogging in the classroom.
Diana Oblinger and Brian Hawkins, “The Myth About Student Competency,” EDUCAUSE Review 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006), 12–13, http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0627.asp: A discussion of student technology know-how and the ways it often hides critical gaps in student information literacy.

Examples of Institutional Blogging Support Services

The sites below show some of the different ways educational blogging services can be offered in a higher education setting:

Brown University, Instructional Technology Group, http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/CIS/Faculty/Tools/blogs.html.
Tufts University, Spark suite of communication and collaboration tools that includes blogs, http://spark.uit.tufts.edu/index.jsp.
University of Arizona, Instructional Blogging and Best Practices page, http://elearn.arizona.edu/blogs/bestpractices/.
University of Florida, Tools and Techniques Toolbox for Blogs page, http://www.citt.ufl.edu/toolbox/toolbox_blogs.php.
University of Wisconsin, “Blogs: Uses in an Educational Setting,” online seminar, http://academictech.doit.wisc.edu/workshops/epedagogy/sessions/epedagogyBlogs.htm.
Warwick University, Warwick Blogs getting-started page, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/servicessupport/web/blogs/.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Creating Blogs in Your Course, http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/HowTo/MyWPI/blogs.html.

Deciding if Blogging Is Right for Your Learning Goals

Applying Technology to Teaching and Learning, ELI Discovery Tools, 2006, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, http://www.educause.edu/11816: A set of guides to help select and integrate technology into teaching and learning (open to ELI members only).

Legal Considerations—General

U.S. laws affecting intellectual property, privacy, and other areas that relate to blogging are discussed on the sites below:

12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know, http://www.avivadirectory.com/blogger-law/: A quick summary of the important legal concerns for bloggers.
Bloggers FAQ—Student Blogging, Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-students.php: Touches on legal issues arising from student blogging; although focused on high school students, includes some information for college students.
Legal Guide for Bloggers, Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/: An extensive set of resources on the legal issues of blogging.

Legal Considerations—Institutional Policy

Non-Pseudonymous Student Blogging: Ethical and Legal Concerns, Blogs for Learning, http://blogsforlearning.msu.edu/blog/archives/2.

The following are samples of institutional policies dealing with FERPA and other legal issues particular to higher education. As recommended throughout this guide, consult your legal counsel for guidance on specific campus policies.

North Carolina State University, WolfBlogs: Information for Faculty, http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/blogs/faculty.html.
University of Minnesota, Blog Service Guidelines and Description, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/uthink/service.phtml.

How Can I Contribute?

To open a forum for sharing and discussing examples of the use of blogging in teaching and learning, we’ve set up the Community Contributions blog. We invite you to post information about how your institution is using blogging for teaching and learning and to comment on the projects posted by others.