Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs

Accompanying the emergence of blog technology as a dominant online publishing paradigm is a growing interest in its educational benefits and applications. This study sets out to develop an empirically grounded framework for educational blogging in the context of teacher education. A working framework was first proposed that highlights four areas: self-expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue. An exploratory study was then conducted to examine the framework by involving two groups of student teachers during their teaching practice. This study revealed that the salient values of blogs centered on emotionally charged and social-oriented individual expressions as well as self-reflection. The interactive functionality of blogs was used mostly for exchanging social support rather than reflective dialogue. A new dimension - blog-reading - has emerged through the investigation and been added to the original framework. The findings can contribute to a better understanding of the educational values of blogs and their meaningful applications as educational media.