In education, weblogs are being used in a variety of ways, including providing students an avenue for expressing themselves and for reflecting on what they have learned. They are also used to create collaborative communities for students and instructors as they progress through a course or work on shared projects. They act as a kind of knowledge management system that keeps track of who's doing what as well as tasks yet to be accomplished. In addition, several faculty publish weblogs to provide commentary and links to resources in their areas of expertise.

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is using weblogs extensively, not only to facilitate courses and provide students a publishing medium, but also as a subject of scholarly inquiry.

Last year the Journalism school began offering a course to explore the journalistic implications of weblogs. As part of the course, the students created a group weblog about intellectual property in the digital age , which continues to be updated to this day.

"I think it worked rather well," says Paul Grabowicz, adjunct professor of new media. "What I like about weblogs is that they bring journalism issues that are lurking out there to the surface. They force students to look at what journalism is all about and what the standards are."

Weblog on Iraq created by students in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

This spring, Grabowicz will be co-teaching a course called "The China Digital News Weblog: Covering the Internet's Impact on China," a continuation of a Fall class in which students published a collective weblog. "Weblogs are a powerful medium for journalism students," says Grabowicz, "because they're public forums that emphasize interaction with readers."

Journalism students are publishing weblogs outside of courses as well. For example, two students traveled to Iraq this year and created a weblog to share their experiences there.

Weblogs are also being used in the Journalism school to facilitate student interaction. Visiting professor John Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, teaches a course in which students use a weblog primarily as a project management tool as they develop a magazine.

"Each student is responsible for posting information related to certain topics, which motivates them to get smart on what they need to get smart on," says Battelle. "It's also a great way for the whole group to communicate with each other. In the past we used email but it is a very difficult thing to track because the onus is on everyone to archive the emails. With blogs, information gets archived in one format and you don't have to remember who posted it and where it is. It provides institutional memory for the project."

Last spring at UC Riverside, Brian Reilly, a professor in the Graduate School of Education, had students in his "Portraits in Teaching" course create weblogs to document their student teaching experiences. In addition to reflecting on their teaching, by using web logs the students also fulfilled the technology requirement associated with getting a teacher credential.

By sharing their experiences with each other, students got to know one another better and often discussed their weblogs in class, says Reilly.

"The students really liked them - I was surprised," says Reilly. "The ones who loved doing it did so because they could express their ideas, and because it was personal and meaningful. Some of the students who did a lot of the writing didn't do a lot of talking in class. For me I wouldn't have known much about the students -- it changed drastically how I saw some of them."