Article Preview
TopLiterature Review
There has been an increasing use of blogs in the educational context in the last 10 years (Downes, 2009; Edublogs, 2011; Sim & Hew, 2010; Xie & Sharma, 2004; Zeng & Harris, 2005). Blogs are personal online journals (Godwin-Jones, 2003) where the content is arranged as entries of text and hyperlinks (Vogel & Goans, 2005). The posts or entries are arranged in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post published at the top of the blog (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright, 2004; Paquet, 2003; Vogel & Goans, 2005; Ward, 2004; Williams & Jacobs, 2004). This characteristic creates an expectation of updates that incites readers to visit the site on a regular basis (Paquet, 2003). A timestamp for each entry is also provided so the reader knows when it was posted (Vogel & Goans, 2005). Blogs are easy to use as no programming knowledge is required to post an entry online (Huffaker, 2005b; Zawilinski, 2009). The ease of use and access to blogs, together with the benefits of blogging, suggest that teachers could explore the use of blogs, especially for out-of-class teaching and learning.