Blogging in an online health information technology class.

In this article we introduce blogs, including their brief history, their current status, and motivations for blogging. We describe how we created a course blog in one online Health information management (HIM) baccalaureate course. We describe three pedagogical purposes (online discussion, digital drop box, and class project management tool) of the course blog. We report the results of our after-class survey on using the blog as a learning tool. Survey results illustrated that 55 percent of the students agree that the blog can be a tool for facilitating learning, 50 percent agree it can be used as a tool for student activities, 60 percent agree it can serve as a medium for reflective thinking and writing, and 60 percent want to see its application in other courses.