Do blogging and reading blogs actually help you learn things more and better?

According to the knol by Guy Dickinson, the answer is yes.

Guy examined blogs from an educational perspective, as follow:

1. Research: Blogs act as a self-directed research, and the resulting knowledge can be utilised in a flexible and simple way.
2. Taxonomies: Blogs help bloggers to categorising their research efficiently and quickly.
3. Developing domain knowledge: Aggregating relevant knowledge will enhance educational development.
4. Recognising relationships within disparate data: Searching and relating data.
5. Collaborative learning: The commenting system of blogs creates a learning community.

Due to the blogs’ characteristics and structures, Guy concluded that blogs can aid us to learn things better and faster, as well as enhancing expertise:

1. The technical and social nature of weblogs enables them to be used in a number of pedagogically useful ways.
2. The technical infrastructure of weblogs assists knowledge gathering with the creation of taxonomies and the automatic display of domain knowledge from other websites.
3. weblogs also accelerate the development of expertise by assisting expert behaviour such as inferring previously unseen relationships between information and facilitating the reflection nature of learning.
4. weblogs can demonstrate, on a very simple level, emergent behaviour similar to that at the lower levels of attainment for students; inferring relationships between weblog entries and creating new relationships between information.

In my opinion, blogging does offer you a unique opportunity to share what you know. As you share, you are actually learn and develop yourself even more and better, due to the information you’ve researched to create blog posts.

So, my conclusion is, if you want to have a better understanding in a subject, blog on it.

To learn more, please visit Guy’s knol.

Image by cambodia4kidsorg.