Issues for Educators

For a tutor who might consider offering guidance to a student blogger, there are a number of challenges and caveats.

The quality of the entries can vary considerably: some contributions were difficult to follow, being staccato in style and very lax in grammar, though usually not going quite as far as SMS 'textspeak' with all its abbreviations. Thus, basic guidelines may be needed on the use of the English language, perhaps assisted by some monitoring. Further, keeping a blog going for any lengthy period requires a lot of commitment and there is a risk of 'blog rot', in which blogs become neglected and fall into disuse. So there needs to be a good reason to get started and it must be sustainable for at least some while.

A common complaint is that blogs contain such a diversity of thoughts that it becomes difficult to find relevant points, though it may be argued that many aspects are interdependent and need the bigger picture, which a blog can provide. There is always the danger of mental proliferation, resulting in blogs going off topic: the empty boxes in blogs don't provide explicit means to take an idea and focus on it and refine it further, so more effort is required by authors to keep contributions relevant, with the need for guidance and vigilance by tutors.

Many blog systems provide some means of structuring blogs, which can mitigate these disadvantages, notably the facility to group entries through categories. Categories may be from a controlled vocabulary, completely user-defined, or a mixture of both. Similarly, some systems support tags, which specify a property of an object, and can apply to a particular entry. Where structuring elements are scarce, the choice can have a very important impact.

Students are likely to put more effort into blogs if they feel that someone is taking notice of their blogs on more than an occasional basis. However, it would probably take quite a lot of experience to know how to interpret and respond appropriately: an individual might make challenging assertions about workload, which could be well-founded or an indication of other problems that need a pastoral response. In such cases, having a group of student blogs to compare side by side is valuable.