Nos últimos anos, pesquisadores em diferentes países e em áreas distintas têm se dedicado à investigação das potencialidades dos blogs nos processos educativos em todos os níveis de ensino. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento de estudos exploratórios sobre a elaboração, aplicação e uso de blogs como ferramentas de apoio a uma disciplina de comunicação científica oferecida em um curso superior de química. A elaboração dos blogs seguiu as recomendações presentes no trabalho de Browntein e Klein. O processo de implementação e adaptação foi realizado em duas etapas, de acordo com as estratégias de ensino aplicadas na disciplina, que envolveram atividades com artigos científicos e atividades de resolução de casos investigativos. Durante o semestre letivo, os alunos publicaram nos blogs as suas atividades extraclasse, reflexões e comentários. A professora e o estagiário também publicaram seus comentários. Ao final do semestre, os alunos responderam a um questionário elaborado com base no Modelo de Aceitação de Tecnologia, proposto por Davis, para análise da aceitação em relação ao uso dos blogs. A utilização dos blogs foi avaliada a partir da análise quantitativa e qualitativa das mensagens publicadas. A análise quantitativa foi realizada por contagem e classificação das mensagens em relação à autoria, ao tipo de mensagem, e ao horário, dia e mês em que foram publicadas. A análise qualitativa baseou-se no conteúdo das reflexões e dos comentários. A análise das reflexões foi realizada com base nos estudos sobre a aprendizagem reflexiva e a dos comentários foi realizada com base no Modelo de Henri. A aplicação dos blogs mostrou-se um caminho enriquecedor, pois facilitou a aplicação das estratégias de ensino adotadas na disciplina. A análise dos dados coletados no estudo aponta para a postura favorável dos estudantes frente à utilização dos blogs. / Recently some researchers in different countries and areas of education have been interested in investigating the potential of blogs in educational processes at all levels of education. This work aims to conduct exploratory studies about the development, implementing and using blogs as tools to blended learning in a scientific communication course offered in an undergraduate chemistry course. The development of the blogs was based on the work of Klein and Browntein. The process of implementing and adapting the blogs was conducted in two stages according to the strategies applied in the course, which involved activities with scientific articles and case studies. Along the semester, students posted their activities, thoughts, and comments. The professor and the teacher assistant also posted their comments. At the end of the semester, students answered a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model, proposed by Davis, for the analysis of acceptance regarding the use of the blogs. The evaluation of the use of the blogs was based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the posts. The quantitative analysis was performed by counting and classifying the posts regarding the authorship, type of message, and the time, day and month they were posted on the blogs. The qualitative analysis was based on the content of reflections and comments. The reflection analysis was based on studies on reflective learning, and the analysis of comments was based on the Henri\'s Model. The use of the blogs proved promising because it makes easier the application of the teaching strategies adopted in the course. The analysis of the data collected in the study shows the students to be highly in favor of the use of the blogs as an effective tool to teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 applications facilitate various adaptations of blogs on many different areas. Bloggers who have blog publications and financially depend on the blog are referred to as professional bloggers in this study. As blogging becomes a social trend, a phenomenon, and more – a profession, there should be a rule or a guideline, and relationship marketing is suggested by the author. Guided by relationship marketing, with the definition extracted from various literatures, the study is based on the structure of Christopher, Payne & Ballantyne (1991) – the relationship marketing ladder of customer loyalty. The purposes of the study are to examine the importance of interaction in the blogger-blog reader relationships, and most significantly, to test if relationship marketing can fit-into the blogosphere. Adopting a two-phase, sequential mixed method, this study applied both qualitative and qualitative research tools. In the first phase, a pretest survey was conducted to serve as the base for further research. In the second phase, focus group discussions were carried out to explore more insights of blogs, blogging, and the target bloggers, Wan Wan & Queen, from blog readers’ perspective. At last, a final-found survey was conducted to collect more data for testing the hypotheses and feasibility of the research framework. To conclude, interaction is indispensible in managing blogs. Interactions and blog readers’ expectations toward the blog influence their satisfaction with the blog, and further affect the development of loyalty to spread word-of-mouth. The suggestions for further research including studying from different perspective, adopting longer time span, collecting a larger sample, categorizing bloggers, and implementing behavioral research for business use. / Web 2.0 applications facilitate various adaptations of blogs on many different areas. Bloggers who have blog publications and financially depend on the blog are referred to as professional bloggers in this study. As blogging becomes a social trend, a phenomenon, and more – a profession, there should be a rule or a guideline, and relationship marketing is suggested by the author. Guided by relationship marketing, with the definition extracted from various literatures, the study is based on the structure of Christopher, Payne & Ballantyne (1991) – the relationship marketing ladder of customer loyalty. The purposes of the study are to examine the importance of interaction in the blogger-blog reader relationships, and most significantly, to test if relationship marketing can fit-into the blogosphere. Adopting a two-phase, sequential mixed method, this study applied both qualitative and qualitative research tools. In the first phase, a pretest survey was conducted to serve as the base for further research. In the second phase, focus group discussions were carried out to explore more insights of blogs, blogging, and the target bloggers, Wan Wan & Queen, from blog readers’ perspective. At last, a final-found survey was conducted to collect more data for testing the hypotheses and feasibility of the research framework. To conclude, interaction is indispensible in managing blogs. Interactions and blog readers’ expectations toward the blog influence their satisfaction with the blog, and further affect the development of loyalty to spread word-of-mouth. The suggestions for further research including studying from different perspective, adopting longer time span, collecting a larger sample, categorizing bloggers, and implementing behavioral research for business use.

In recent years, more and more mass mediums mentioned blog, the new individual public mediums in network, and more and more blogger began blogging. They documented their life, expressed deeply felt emotions and provide commentary and opinions in blog. Blog is stage that blogger present self for audience, blogger can transmit image to their audience. But these bloggers express what self-presentation in blog? This research use the concept of self-presentation and analysis of social network, and study the social network is formed with online dairies blog and the self image. we discovered that connection relations centralize in the popular blogs, and the more popular blogs have more indegree. The support of audience is motivation of continue writing for blog. In the dimension of self-presentation, the most self in blog is decorated from real life of blogger. But even blogger can choice to present which image, they still reproduced structure and characteristic of real world in blogoshpere. The research also discovered blogger wish to segregate audience, presented different self before different reader.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the Weblog Image-text Transmission Model shaped the writing process for third grade students and if this model affected their attitude towards writing. This study adopted an action research approach. Participants in this study were thirty-three third graders in an elementary school in Tainan. Qualitative data were collected from class observations, interviews, student blog contents, and related instructional artifacts . Quantitative data were collected from two measurments : the Rating Scale for Writing, and the Attitude to Writing Scale. Results showed that the Weblog Image-text Transmission Model benefited participants in retrieving prior experiences and knowledge and organizing writing contents. In addition, participants were more willing to express themselves and share their thoughts with their peer students. Participants also tended to complete their writing assignment within the time limit. Lastly, participants writing attitude with respect to¡§fondness for writing¡¨ and ¡§the confidence of using writing to express feelings¡¨ were also raised (p¡Õ.05) . Meanwhile, there were no significant differencse before and after test in ¡§willingness to enhance one¡¦s writing ability¡¨ and ¡§the preceived value of writing¡¨.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet and the broadband network, many users are using the Web 2.0 services such as blogs, Wiki and the applications called social software. Many teachers have also tried to apply social software for teaching and learning and thought Web 2.0 services could be used for documenting students¡¦learning portfolios. On the other hand, many organizations have been conducting e-learning for years and accumulated a huge amount of historical data. One of the new trends in lifelong learning is to provide learners to be able to review all their pass learning portfolios such that they can share and reflect on what they have learned and even better advertising themselves using e-portfolios. The ePortfolio management system (EPMS) is arising for the reasons stated above. However, there are three problems with the existing e-portfolio systems. Firstly, functions provided for supporting e-portfolio are bounded into the conventional learning management system (LMS) which are not flexible and difficult to access for outside users without LMS accounts. Secondly, if using open source software to create e-portfolio systems, the integration with existing LMS is not seamless integrated. Thirdly, there are lacking standards to support data exchanges among different e-portfolio systems. This research aims to develop an integrated e-portfolio system by observing the existing obstacles, surveying related literature and interviewing several domain experts to acquire the requirements for building the e-portfolio system using Web2.0 services. After the system developed, an experiment for trial use was conducted to get feedbacks from users and an interview with three domain experts was also carried out for evaluating the system. The results show that the developed e-portfolio system can meet with many e-portfolio applications. Some future research issues have also been proposed to conclude this study.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T17:20:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo3446_1.pdf: 2389401 bytes, checksum: 43445560bf93663300ccb82886731f2a (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A grande explosão dos blogs nos últimos anos e o início de seu uso como ambientes educacionais, especialmente por comunidades educativas, chamou nossa atenção a respeito deste novo espaço virtual de relacionamento e seu impacto na educação. Desta forma, nosso objetivo foi investigar o uso dos blogs brasileiros, buscando compreender o funcionamento destes espaços virtuais no contexto educacional. Identificamos tipos de blogs de acordo com seu uso e analisamos seus funcionamentos, a fim de identificar quais ferramentas e estratégias foram usadas para o ensino dos diversos conteúdos, bem como quem participou das atividades nos blogs. A partir desta análise, sugerimos estratégias de usos educativos dos mesmos. Este estudo teve uma perspectiva netnográfica, ou seja, efetuamos uma etnografia virtual. Os dados coletados a partir de uma observação evidenciaram que os blogs podem ser utilizados como ambientes virtuais de ensino e aprendizagem, podem proporcionar um aumento do tempo pedagógico, sendo espaço abrigador de atividades, podem ser um canal de comunicação entre professores e alunos, podem criar redes de pesquisa de diversos conteúdos, dentre tantas outras possibilidades efetivas de ações inovadoras para a educação. Entretanto, os blogs ainda não provocam uma interatividade espontânea por parte dos alunos, que somente se manifestam quando solicitados ou se vêem obrigados a fazê-lo. Os professores também sujeitos desta pesquisa mostraram-se, acima de tudo, como elementos formadores de grandes anéis de interação na web, culminando na criação de comunidades virtuais de troca de informações e idéias. Apesar disso, percebemos que os blogs ainda são usados de forma muito tímida pelos mesmos. Para que esse cenário mudasse seria necessário, primeiramente, o entendimento das suas possibilidades educativas e secundariamente, e não menos importante, seria preciso que os professores estivessem dispostos a disponibilizar um tempo para dedicar-se à criação, utilização e manutenção de seus blogs. Consequentemente, seria de fundamental importância conscientizar também os alunos e toda a comunidade escolar, que os blogs são espaços que podem trazer grandes quantidades de informação (de qualidade), amplas possibilidades de diversão e interatividade e ainda podem auxiliar no processo de formação. Essa reflexão conjunta, realizada pelos sujeitos envolvidos nas comunidades educativo-educacionais, proporcionaria, a nosso ver, uma ampla compreensão dessa nova tecnologia, o que poderia culminar no desenvolvimento de metodologias específicas de uso dos blogs para uma educação baseada nos pilares da educação do verdadeiro século 21

Title: Blog Influence on Consumer Information Search Authors: Emma Hammer, Charlotta Hellström & Emma Martin Tutor: Jonas Dahlqvist Date: 2015-05-11 Key Words: Blog marketing, information search, blog characteristics, blog influence, consumer behavior, online information, online communication Abstract Information search is crucial to consumers because it can potentially lead to better decision-making, therefor it is argued to be the most important aspect during the consumer decision process (Beatty & Smith, 1987; Schmidt & Spreng, 1996). The Internet has greatly impacted the way consumers search for information (Peterson & Merino, 2003). The easy access of online information has made consumers to turn to blogs as an information source, to find inspiration and to be entertained. Moreover, the opportunity to interact with bloggers increases trust and thus consumers feel a stronger connection to the information being shared (Piscopo, 2015).   This thesis intends to analyze and describe what influences consumers to use blogs as an information source and why consumers continuously use blogs over traditional media. To be able to fully understand the use of blogs, the most influential characteristics of blogs affecting consumer behavior are investigated. This thesis discusses similarities and differences with existing literature concerning blogs and consumer behavior and intends to narrow the knowledge gap on the topic.   To fulfill the purpose of this thesis, existing literature was carefully studied to gain knowledge of the topic and qualitative primary data was collected through personal interviews to gain insights from consumers’ perspectives among experienced blog readers. The interview questions were developed based on the theory and previous literature addressed in this study.   The findings of our study indicated that all of the respondents were influenced to read blogs both internally and externally. Our study showed that consumers prefer using blogs as an information source over traditional media because it is easily accessible, free and more convenient. Finally, the continuous use of blogs was realized as a result of these blog characteristics explained by the respondents: familiarity, frequency, convenience, inspirational, humor and professionalism.

Följande är en kvalitativ studie som analyserar bloggskribenter och bloggläsare. Studiens syfteär att undersöka hur presentationen av ett inlägg på en blogg och relationen som en bloggläsarehar till bloggskribenten kan påverka bloggläsarens konsumtion. Vidare syftar studien till attbidra till en bättre förståelse av bloggfenomenet och dess effekt på generationen millenierna,personer födda under år 1991-1998.Genom semistrukturerade intervjuer på millenierna och insamlad teori är slutsatsen attpresentationen av ett blogginlägg och relationen som bloggläsaren har till bloggskribenten haren stor påverkan på deras konsumtion. Relationen är enligt bloggläsaren grundat på vissafaktorer samt så har presentationen av ett inlägg en påverkan på läsarens konsumtion. Dettaanalyseras i studiens diskussion och avslutas med förslag till vidare forskning inom ämnet. / The following study is a qualitative analysis between blog writers and blog readers. Thepurpose of this study is to investigate how the presentation of post on blogs and the relationshipthe blog readers have to the blog author can affect blog reader’s consumption. This willcontribute to a better understanding for the blog phenomena and its effect on the generationmillennial, born between 1991-1998.By semi-structured interviews on millennial and gathered information from academic literaturea conclusion have been made that the presentation of a post and the relationship the blog readershave to the blog author have a big impact on the behaviour for consumption. Furthermore therelationship is being established on some conditions, by the reader’s point of view. How well apost will affect a reader is based on how posts are presented in the blog by the author. This isbeing analysed and discussed in this study. We finish the study with proposals for furtherresearch in this subject

The study of blogs up to this point has primarily, though not exclusively, covered "A-list" and political or campaign blogs. Large filter blogs have not yet been the focus of communication research and offer an exciting new area of scholarship in online communication. This study examined if and how the environmental blog, TreeHugger, works to engage and maintain the online environmental community by potentially acting an online environmental public sphere and interacting with users who make up the community. Through a content analysis of two constructed weeks of blog posts (N=336) and their comments (N=1342) from the first half of 2008, this study examined the discussion of issues, use of interactive feature, and presence of the metacommunication frame in both groups. Results showed significant influence of topic and tone in the blog posts on the subsequent user comments. They also showed how commenters' discussion can operate quite independently as well. In particular, comments were found to have a negative valence significantly more than the posts. Also, the focus of external metacommunication frames in each differed significantly, with posts referencing other mass media more often. Overall, this thesis concludes that writers for blogs like TreeHugger have limited influence on the discussion in the comments. Greater understanding of that influence could help bloggers engage readers better and promote active dialogue. / Master of Arts

Den här uppsatsen undersöker hur sponsrat material smälter in i det övriga innehållet, i två etablerade bloggar. Den ena är Petra Tungårdens professionella blogg och den andra är Nicole Falcianis privata blogg. Det är en jämförande studie mellan sponsrade blogginlägg och osponsrade inlägg. Studien är en kvalitativ retorikanalys som med hjälp av teorierna native advertising, retorik, personligt varumärke och parasocial interaktion undersöker hur de två bloggarna men hjälp av argumentation säjer in produkter eller tjänster till sina läsare. Resultatet visar att det finns både likheter och skillnader mellan argumentationen i de sponsrade och de osponsrade inläggen. Gemensamt för bloggarna är att det finns betydligt fler skillnader än likheter i argumentationen, men i den privata bloggen fanns det mycket fler skillnader jämfört den professionella. Vidare diskuteras att skillnaderna inte är tillräckligt markanta för att läsarna ska kunna upptäcka dem, och att problematiken med att urskilja sponsrat material kvarstår. / This paper investigates how sponsored content blend in with the other content, in two established blogs. One is Petra Tungården who has a professional blog, and one is Nicole Falciani's personal blog. It is a comparative study between sponsored blog posts and non-sponsored blog posts. The study is a qualitative rhetoric analysis using the theories native advertising, rhetoric, personal branding and parasocial interaction to investigate how the two bloggers recommend products or services to their readers with the help of argumentation. The result shows that the argumentation for the sponsored and the non-sponsored posts have both smililarities and differences. Both blogs have many more differences than similarities, but the personal blog turned out to have much more differences than the professional one. Further on it is discussed that the differences are not sufficientlly pronounced to the readers to detect them, and that the problem of distinguishing the sponsored content remains.