Why is it significant?

Why is it significant? Because blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, re ection, and debate, they often attract a large and dedicated readership. Blogs are becoming an important component of the Internet landscape, providing authors and readers with an avenue for unedited expression, reaction, and connection, without the censorship of mediated chat rooms or formal media outlets. The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means that open discussions can be established almost immediately, making blogs an ideal venue for far-reaching discussions among the Internet community on new or timely topics. Blogs foster the growth of communities, and the dynamics of collaborative filtering and recommending/referring may provide new ways to evaluate, vet, and critique student-created knowledge.

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What are the downsides?

What are the downsides? Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individuals, they can include biased or inaccurate information. Users visiting a blog might see it as factual or authoritative when, in fact, it is the online equivalent of a soap box: a place to speak and to be heard. Unlike chat rooms, blogs are unmed iated and therefore offer a different ty pe of venue for individuals to express themselves and air their opinions, ideas, and attitudes. While this may be acceptable for a personal blog, it might be in appropriate for a blog hosted on an institutional server. Intellectual property is another area of concern for higher education, given the implications of hosting blogs that might include content that has been used without proper attribution. Blogs are also highly volatile. Bloggers can edit or delete posts, and this transient nature can make blogs difficult to archive or index. In addition, the time-limited relationship of students to institutions in uences the length of time a student blog should be hosted, yet removing posts from the blogosphere once a student has graduated could confound those who linked to the post.

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