The Future of Education

The educational application of blogging is becoming widely recognized and the number of educational bloggers is growing daily. Blogs may be used to replace standard class Web Page, to link course-related Internet items, organize seminars and provide summaries of reading, or organize in-class discussions.

As the number of public schools and universities integrating weblogs in education increases, theoretical background of processes involved in using weblogs for teaching and learning is becoming more elaborated, and research data regarding the efficiency of these activities is being accumulated.

There is anecdotic evidence that blogs can be used for such metacognitive activities as planning, monitoring and self-assessment tool of learning. In order to provide more systematic data, a project of blog writing was designed and piloted at Kecskemét College, Hungary, aimed at stimulating metacognitive thinking strategies. During a course in personal development, students were asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade, with instruction to plan and revise their activities like problem-solving processes.

Comparing different aspects of outcomes, such as level of engagement, transfer of knowledge or use of critical thinking during problem solving activities, the results clearly indicate that using blogs is a possibility of stimulating metacognitively aware learning in classroom settings.