Matrix of Uses of Blogs in Education

Hopefully from the posts over the last few days you've gotten a better sense of what blogs are, and how you can access them and maybe even create your own. Now we get to move on to the more exciting stuff - how you might use this technology as educators.

We introduced working with blogs in two steps on purposes - though people often only focus on writing when they discuss blogs, for me blogging is a combination of both writing and reading. Working from this premise, I threw together this matrix of the possible uses of blogs in education. (You can also access this as a static image instead of a Word doc if you don't have Word.)

Some caveats here - this matrix only really considers students, instructors and 'the rest of the net' as actors. Obviously one could add much to this - librarians, institutional RSS feeds, other academic workers... That's why I titled it 'Some' uses of blogs in education. And even just considering this limited set of actors, I have definitely left much off. And I didn't try to enumerate all of instructional events and applications you could facilitate through blogs (e.g. webquests as one example). My goal here was to illustrate that blogs are about both writing and reading, and that one's professional practice and ones instructional practice can be facilitated with the same technology. Does this give you any more ideas on how you could incorporate these into your own practice?

As a preamble to the upcoming discussions on other potential uses, you might also be interested in this set of examples of courses using blogs in education.