Exploring factors affecting students' engagement with blogging

Deng Liping and Allan H K Yuen
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China


In the past decade, blog technology has become the dominant self-publishing paradigm on the Internet. Concurrently, there has been a growing interest in its educational value and implementation, with both theoretical explorations and empirical evidence beginning to accumulate. Blogs have been found to be conducive to learner-centred and community-based learning. However, empirical studies on using blogs for teaching and learning are still very limited, in particular investigations from students' perspectives. Students' blogging is often required and counted as a part of formal assessment, but the conditions or factors that facilitate or inhibit their engagement with blogging have been largely ignored.

The primary concern of this paper is to examine the motivating and inhibiting factors that influence students' voluntary blogging to document and share their experience. The study involved students in a post-graduate diploma programme at a local university in Hong Kong . The students' low uptake of blogging prompted us to investigate the reasons which lay behind this. Data collected through questionnaires and individual interviews suggested that the determining factors could be categorized into three dimensions: technology, individual and community. We highlight the internal needs and contextual conditions vital for the adoption of a new technology in support of community sharing and interaction. The results of this study can enrich the collective understanding of students' online participation and provide guidelines for a more purposeful and effective use of blogs and other online media for teaching and learning.