Recently, some researchers in different countries and areas of education have been interested in investigating the potential of using blogs in educational processes at all levels of education (Duda & Garrett, 2008). Ferdig and Trammell (2004) suggest that “the use of blogs helps students become subject-matter experts” and that “the use of blogs increases student interest and ownership in learning.” Blogging gives voice to students who often feel uncomfortable speaking up in class (Pick, 2005; Ganley,2004) and can have a powerful impact on a greater number of students in the classroom as it supports more learning styles.

This work aims to conduct exploratory studies about the development, implementing, and using blogs as a tool for blended learning in a scientific communication course offered in an undergraduate chemistry course in a Brazilian university. Students-authored blogs on the learning modality were developed based on the work of Brownstein and Klein (2006). 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. Static pages (to provide instructions and guidelines of extracurricular activities, information on assessments, links to aid in the search for articles, and schedule of activities) and categories for posting the answers to the activities, reflections, and comments were included in the blogs. Along the semester, students posted their activities, thoughts, and comments, and the teacher posted their messages.

The online discussions were analyzed using Henri’s (1992) content analysis model for asynchronous conferencing in computer-mediated communication.  His model was used to analyze the level of participation and the nature of the interaction between participants.  The relationship among the message postings reveals the extent to which the learners and teacher are responding to one another.

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