Blogging in the Political Science Classroom

Weblogs (or blogs), as a form of communication on the Internet, have recently risen in prominence but may be poorly understood by both faculty and students. This article explains how blogs differ from other online communication tools and how political science faculty canmake use of blogs in their classes. The focus is on using blogs as part of class assignments to reinforce important skills, including critical thinking, political engagement, and essay writing. We also discuss existing academic and professional blogs that may be models for student blogging in political science. Over the last decade, information technology (IT) innovations, including in-class presentation technologies, course content-management systems (such as Blackboard, WebCT, and Sakai1), and e-mail, have transformed the ways that faculty teach and interact with students. Among the new technologies are a host of online tools, including Weblogs, wikis, discussion forums, and e-mail lists, that are often bundled into popular content-management systems.While these new technologies offer new opportunities, they may also present challenges for faculty who are less familiar with the differences among the tools and their potential educational uses. In this article, we focus primarily on the instructional applications of Weblogs (blogs), which offer particular challenges and opportunities for political science faculty who may be considering the use of this tool as part of their courses.2 In this regard, our purpose is to provide a basic introduction to blogging and offer some ideas, based on our experiences, for using blogging in the political science classroom.