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A longitudinal analysis of the behavioural patterns in teachers using blogs for knowledge interactions

Introduction Compared to traditional online forums, blogs have features such as knowledge-filtering, personal logs, and digital notebooks (Blood, 2002). Many researches explored the applications of blogs in education (e.g., Churchill, 2009), and the feasibility of using blogs as a tool for professional development was discussed (e.g., Hou et al., 2009). By analyzing interactions recorded on teacher-blogs, we may explore the behavioral patterns of teachers using blogs. However, long-term, large-scale empirical longitudinal researches on teachers’ interactions in blogs are still quite limited. Using cluster analysis, we can place interaction behaviors into different clusters, and this allows us to explore different types of interactions as well as their proportions, characteristics and limitations. Therefore, this study applied cluster analysis to explore the behavioral patterns among 11,724 teachers on the 107 teacher-blogs for 46 months in Taiwan and discuss potential interaction-related limitations. We then propose suggestions for teacher-trainers in their use of blogs for professional development.