Blogs in Education: What educational value?

Since their birth in the late 1990s, blogs have become popular on the Web as a means of expressing any kind of creative professionals and journalists, writers, entertainers, politicians, teachers, artists, etc.. A blog (weblog or web book) may be defined as a site that presents chronologically short articles or notes, including text, links, photos or audio-video players, as well as the remarkable feature "Comments" for host communication with others. A. As noted Roux compared forums and mailing lists, the blog offers a complete editorial freedom: "At a public forum, the subjects and their contents are governed by moderators.

Participating visitors can create topics, articles and respond to items of other participants. The contents of a blog belong entirely to the individual who publishes. Its editorial freedom is complete. It can create topics, articles and also govern the items visitors (accept or remove comments received). And another big difference is the aggregation: "How many times have you gone on a site to see if there was new? Once, twice, three times ... to finally stop going out of discouragement or simply loss of interest ... There is now a very reliable process that allows a user to know if there is a new site. Each blog includes a special type of RSS or XML (. Rdf,. Php. Rss and. Xml), which is an update of new entries each time the user writes or modifies a new page in his blog. These files are the son of media that allow the aggregation. It is possible for readers who wish to subscribe to a feed Releases (Newswire) using a tracker (Newsreader), which, whenever it is launched, will "sniff" these type files RSS or XML. If the tracker detects new entries on the blogs visited, he brought a title and, in some cases, a summary of all new articles. "

According to records Practices multimedia blogs (French-speaking) and blogs and Education (Project FLENET), teachers are increasingly likely to benefit from the interest generated by weblogs among young people by integrating them into their classroom practices and exploiting its educational potential.

The testimony of education stakeholders in favor of blogs are many. Mr. Tome article in Educational applications weblogs class observes: "We must understand that the blog over the functions, capabilities and dynamics of traditional web pages and the Forum: it offers both opportunities (website and forum) within the same space. It allows the development of a communication, sharing, debate. Not to mention that the teacher can develop a space for consultation and support for its students. Teachers and students who discover blogs immediately went to their immense potential pédagoqique. "

Mr. Asselin remark in his blog Mario tout de go: "We are using the blogs because they are social tools. We found that young people are keen users of environments that allow them to interact with others. These spaces help writing an impressive number of publications in which the conversation becomes possible through written comments. In doing so, people comment on what is "posted", the new thread to inform subscribers of the arrival of a new "entry" (a process of content syndication) and multimedia environment that results allows to name what has been learned, which is making sense and what is the step to complete what is to learn! "

There are already many Internet applications pédagogiques des weblogs in education. Thus in the Blogs and Education presents various examples of the teacher blogs, blogs for the classroom and blogs for students, so that highlights the latest educational experience with audio and video weblogs.

Because blogs are also a new medium and a new "writing" (new technology, creative, interactive and communicative on the web), which is in the process of generating new forms of creation, dialogue and consumption, the podcast and videoblogs communities so different from traditional media.