Why Google+ Circles is Failing

Why Google+ Circles is Failing

View more presentations from Joe Gray

How Blogs Benefit In Web-based Training and Learning

I believe everyone has heard about blogs. There are many kinds of blogs out there such as Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, Xanga, LiveJournal and so on so fore. Let’s back to the main topic of discussion. What actually are the blogs? What the benefits of using them, especially in Web-based Training(WBT)?

‘A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.’

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

There are a lot of benefits using blog in WBT. First, it’s free. It’s a low-cost academic blogging. The educators and trainers no need to pay for a website or purchase a domain name every year.

Secondly, it’s user friendly with simple and functional interface design. The educator and trainer don’t need a technical expertise to help them manage their blog or maintain the blog. They can just add new posts and new pages with just a finger click of buttons which already provided on your dashboard without any difficulty. Don’t think that blogs could not create extra pages that allow them to create navigation bar which include “about”, “contacts”, “application form” and so on. Thirdly, reader can leave comments on your posts and start a real-time discussion. Students/trainees will give response below the posts if they have any questions or thoughts toward certain topic. An interesting discussion can just start right there, we don’t even need a formal forum like the website.

Besides that, blogs provided organised categories and archives. The categories and archives are automatically organised according to date or categories you tagged/labelled them by keywords. This well-organisation allows readers search the topics easily by the tags. You can create the outline of the course and clickable links of the weekly topics or brief of assignments so on so fore. Also, it allows backlinks which connect the useful information. The backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to the posts. Moderator can use their blog to generate quality backlinks through well-maintained, informative and active blogging by connecting with other bloggers who has same interests in certain topics and exchange their ideas and thoughts.

Furthermore, blogs are the best CMS. Blogs is the best examples of Content Management Systems (CMS). The educators can easily upload the video files, images, documents or pdf files to the blogs with a few clicks of the mouse. Blogs help to connect with Professionals and SME. If the educators and trainers are consistently blog about a subject of their interest, they will maximize the chances of attracting the attention field of experts in that field or study. Blogs allow multiple authors to be the writers/moderators. To run an online course the educators or trainers can gather a few moderators to manage the blog together, because blog allows multiple authors to be the writers/moderators. Therefore, they have several authors contributing to a topic or a series of topics. Blogs allows subscription. The students/trainees can subscribe to the online course they taken and will get email or RSS notifications while the blog is updated or someone is commented on certain post that they interested in. This convenient feature has made the moderators’ works become easier so that don’t need to email to inform their students/trainees the blog is updated or there are new comments in the blog.

In conclusion, from the benefits that haves listed out, blogs has no technical knowledge needed, allow subscription which will automatically email to students/trainee about the updates, provides organized and structures categories and archives of the blogs and so on so fore. Blogs are really suitable to use as WBT tools for learning and training purpose.