The value of Web-blogs in higher education, my experience with blogs and how their effectiveness can be improved as learning tools for students.

Plagiarism is one topic that is a challenge for both lecturers and students in many universities. For students the continuing urge to copy content and submitting it as their own work is constantly at work in them. There are various reasons for that like the inability to reference work done by other authors for example. For lecturers the work of having to receive and critic plagiarized material is a challenge as they have to train professionals who will have to research and state their views on various topics in their different professions. Needless to say, the challenge here is plagiarism and web-blogs can provide an antidote for challenges concerning plagiarism in the classroom (Oravec,2003). 

Web-blogs help organize the reader's online experience, which can be of a special assistance to students struggling with new material or information (Oravec,2003). 

Classroom experiment with weblogs over the course of one or more semesters can be used to explore the development of a genre page (Oravec,2003).Thus web-blogs bring value to higher education in many ways such as those stated above.

My experience with blogs is not one that is very formal like in the classroom context but rather from a personal point of view. As one who is interested in many activities such a music, many blogs I have seen are for people who share their knowledge, know how and expertise on specific subjects, in this case music. People use blogs to share their views and feelings about what they are passionate about. They take it a step further by monetizing their blogs and earn money for their work. Many you-tubers also have blogs that are linked to the YouTube channels making it easier to engage their followers. For people like these a blog is a cheap alternative to a website as it does not require one to buy a domain name and get hosting.

To make blogs useful to students they must be relevant to what the students are doing in class, in the same time students must be informed that the blog is a personal thing they can do what ever they want with it as long as it is legal. Meaning they can share their experiences and feeling on subjects that interest them. With that said A blog can be like a Facebook account (fun) and not be looked as a work.