An analysis of blogs as a teaching tool as perceived by hospitality management students.

Blogs – online diaries – have become a common marketing tool in the hospitality industry. They also promised to be an effective educational tool. This report analyses the use of blogs as a learning tool. Students from two hospitality technology courses were asked to create a blog and add postings to this blog throughout a semester. At the end of the semester, they were given a survey to measure their perceptions about blogs as a learning tool. A large majority of the students found the task of creating blogs easy with proper instructions. A majority of the students also found blogs effective in learning new material about class subjects. The students perceived that the interaction among peers increased due to the blog assignment. The report includes the instructor’s experience with the blog assignment. Introduction A blog, also called weblog or webblog, is defined as “a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links” (Weil, 2006). In principal, a blog is not different from a webpage. However, a blog can be created with the touch of mouse clicks and no experience in web authoring IS needed (Wu, 2005). The blog is updated instantly and allows readers to post comments (Siemens, 2002). The postings in a blog are also viewed chronologically, therefore giving readers a sense of continuity. Purpose and Objective The purpose of this paper is to analyse hospitality management undergraduate students’ perceptions of blogs as a learning tool. The objectives of this paper are: 1) to give instructions to set up a blog by using a free blog website (blogger.com); 2) to discuss the author’s experience of using blogs as a teaching tool in a hospitality class, and; 3) to present hospitality undergraduate management students’ perceptions of blogs as a learning tool. Cobanoglu (2006) An Analysis of Blogs as a Teaching Tool as Perceived by Hospitality Management Students Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 5(2), 83-88 84 Background Blogs have been commonly used by travellers to post their experiences about the places they visit, stay, entertain and eat (Price and Starkov, 2006). According to Price and Starkov (2006), blogs will play an important role as a marketing tool in hospitality in the very near future. Blogs will be useful in two directions for a hospitality organisation: 1) as part of the hotel defensive strategy; such as reviewing hospitality blogs and identifying trends among the travellers, and addressing the negative points brought by bloggers, and; 2) as a marketing tool in hospitality. A search on BlogPulse (2006) revealed that blogs that contain the keyword travel increased from 3647 blog sites (0.55% of all blog sites) in February 2006 to 4,835 blog sites (0.85% of all blog sites) in August 2006. This indicated a 32.57% increase over about 6 months (BlogPulse, 2006). According to BlogPulse, there are 33 million blog websites as of August 2006, and roughly 800,000 blog postings have been recorded. On average, 50,000 new blogs are created daily. These numbers show the magnitude of this tool as a personal and commercial feeling and experience expression. Blog Creation The author used a free blogging website (blogger.com) to explain how to create a blog. The process of creating a blog is a fairly simple, three step process as explained by the Blogger.com website: 1) create an account; 2) name the blog; and 3) choose a template. At step one the user’s name, password, and email address are collected. At step two the user is required to name the blog website so that it can be identified by readers. In addition, an identifier blog address is also required. In the third step the user is asked to choose one of the templates for the blog website. Once the blog is created, the students can add as many postings as they like. All postings are listed chronologically in the blog. Readers can freely view the contents of the blog and post comments. The owner of the blog can visit the comments left for their blog postings and the communication continues. This way, an asynchronous interaction can take place. Student Survey An online, cross-sectional, descriptive questionnaire was developed. The instrument had three sections. The first section had 21 statements about the use of blogs in a hospitality technology class. In the second section, there were behavioural questions about the use of blogs in the class by the students. The final section had demographic questions. For the statements, a 4-point Likert scale (1=Strongly Agree; 4=Strongly Disagree) was used. A “no opinion” option was also provided to the respondents to prevent the “mid-point” syndrome (Weems and Onwuegbuzie, 2001). Even though mid-point proponents have suggested that inclusion of mid-point increases measurement reliability (Courtenay and Weidermann, 1985; Madden and Klopfer, 1978), Krosnick et al. (1996) suggest that using a mid-point in surveys often results in failure to optimise question answering fully. Furthermore, a four-point scale was deemed more useful than a five-point scale, since it may have produced ‘central point bias’, where some respondents may have selected ‘neutral’ even though they ‘may’ or ‘may not’ have an opinion (Converse and Presser, 1986). A convenience sample was used since asking other instructors to use blogs for a semester, and then surveying the students might have been impractical. Therefore, the author designed an assignment to be given to students in his classes, a Hospitality Technology course, during the Spring 2006 semester. There were 51 students taking the face-to-face class, while 13 students took it online. The assignment was called “Blog Assignment” and was semester-long. The assignment asked students to create a blog on ‘blogger.com’. Students were given a video manual on how to create a blog. Once students had created their blog, all web addresses of the blogs were posted on the class website. Five times in a semester each student was asked to read an article about hospitality technology and add a blog posting about the article (a paragraph summary of the article and one paragraph of reflection about the article). The following week, students were asked to visit two other students’ blogs and then post a comment on their blogs about the postings they had made the previous week. In this way, each Cobanoglu (2006) An Analysis of Blogs as a Teaching Tool as Perceived by Hospitality Management Students Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education 5(2), 83-88 85 student added five blog postings and ten comments on other students’ blogs. The questionnaire was given to students in the final week of the class.