A Weblog for Every Student

(via David Davies)

The University of Warwick is giving every new student the opportunity to start a weblog hosted on their home-grown BlogBuilder system. It’ll be interesting to see what the take-up is once the new university term gets underway. I spoke to Steven Carpenter at the ALT-C conference and he told me that Warwick will probably let the system run for 12 months then they’ll tie it in more closely with their PDP e-portfolios. Perhaps Warwick might even decide that the student weblogs will actually be the e-portfolios, a bit like they’re doing over at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Cool…but here’s what I really want to know. How did they come to the decision that blogs would be a valuable learning tool for students? What were the questions they asked, and the answers they got? Where did they do their reserach? (BTW, Kaye Trammell is on to that angle…) What are their benchmarks for success? How will they evaluate the tool?

And most importantly, did they blog their process???