Evolution of blog submission

It has been three weeks since I started collaborative virtual environments and in that time - I have enjoyed the class thoroughly mainly for the reason that I ask myself questions on how teaching and learning should evolve! If blogs were used as a means of submitting course work, it would make life much easier on the student, the lecturer and the environment (less paper!). Typically a student report would reference webpages in this fashion:

Glogowski, Konrad (2007), "http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/2008/02/04/towards-reflective-blogtalk/", [accessed 17 Feb 2008].

Using an online report this could simply evolve to:

Glogowski, Konrad (2007), "Blog of proximal development", [accessed 17 Feb 2008].

This method saves the teacher having to check references by typing every character individually, also with the proper html encoding can take the lecturer to the exact paragraph the student had referenced from.

The use of blog as a learning journal/diary should be considered, The blog can be browsed by week or by post if necessary and the lecturer can check up on a students progress AND leave feedback. This has a knock-on effect of the student feeling secure in their working environment and improving their skills through this feedback.

Although there are always problems with online documentation, such as security or reliability. A student fills out a blog for 11 weeks straight and on the last week it is hacked or lost due to a hardware problem on the server! Hopefully the student has kept back-ups but all to well do we know how often that happens!

So in conclusion blogs are an advancement in technology and education but we must make the teachers/students/users how to blog safely and appropriately.....and how to make back-ups!