Why a Dissertation Blog???

One of my professional goals this year is to branch out of my comfort zone and try to incorporate new technologies into my courses. This is the first year I have been on a faculty contract since 2007. Having had numerous other full-time duties, teaching was always an overload for me. Consequently, I rarely had time to advance my teaching style and courses by incorporating new technologies. I have been brainstorming ways to incorporate advanced technologies into my research and stats courses (not always an easy thing to do; and I am certainly open to any ideas!!). This semester I plan to have students create a Dissertation Blog. The Dissertation Blog will contain information related to their dissertation, whether it is an article review, a description of the problem statement, ideas for data collection and potential participants, information from discussion posts, essentially whatever they want. This will give students a place that contains all the information related to their dissertation topic. I am going to require that students publish their blogs and update them as often as possible. It is hoped that by publishing the information, others will comment on the blogs, and provide valuable information on the topic. What do you think???