Educational Blogging: Developing and Investigating a Students’ Community of Inquiry

During the last decade, Web 2.0 applications, including blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, media sharing, podcasting, etc., have received intense and growing educational and research interest (Clark et al. 2009; Ravenscroft 2009; Schroeder et al. 2010). It is widely considered that Web 2.0 applications, while not designed specifically for educational purposes, have a number of affordances that provide multiple opportunities for shared content and resources, self-directed learning, collaborative learning, ubiquitous and lifelong learning. The emerged socially based technologies of the Web 2.0 have the potential to offer enhanced learning opportunities and support students’ participation in effective task-oriented personal learning spaces independent of physical, geographic, and institutional boundaries (Hall 2009; McLoughlin and Lee 2010). Among Web 2.0 tools, blogs constitute a new content sharing and development environment supporting students’ engagement, communication, interaction, collaboration, and collective intelligence. During the last years, educational blogs have captured the interest and the imagination of both educators and researchers including diverse learning groups, ranging from primary (Davis 2006; Tse et al. 2010) and secondary education (Angelaina and Jimoyiannis 2009) to higher education (Lin and Yuan 2006; Deng and Yuen 2010; Tan et al. 2010; Xie et al. 2008) and teachers’ professional development as well (Loving et al. 2007; Makri and Kynigos 2007). Literature review on educational blogging revealed a lack of a complete and consistent framework for studying and assessing students’ engagement and the impact of blogging on students’ learning. Farmer (2004) and Cameron and Anderson (2006) have proposed the application of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison et al. 2000, 2001) to blogging activities by comparing blogs’ features with Educational Blogging: Developing and Investigating a Students’ Community of Inquiry