Effectiveness of blog for programming course in supporting engineering students

Programming course teaches students to understanding the concepts of programming and develop application effectively. Students have to acquire skills to identify problems and find suitable solution accordingly. Exposing students to classroom sessions may not be sufficient to ensure they are able to digest and develop the skills required in designing an application. Moreover, engineering program does not include many programming courses to enhance the students´ understanding. To supplement the course, blog is used to provide an opportunity for students to participate and share knowledge on programming concepts and principles. A blog or a web log is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. A blog component model is related to Kolb´s experimental learning which involves four stages; concrete experience, reflection on observation, conceptualization of the relevant knowledge, and active experimentation which validate the gained knowledge. The key stage is the reflection stage which is defined as a process where the students make connection between experience and abstract concepts. To measure the effectiveness of the blog as a discussion tool, two set of data used. The effectiveness of blog is evaluated using two important measures which are student performance and blog performance. This paper discuss on the early stage of development of the blog and measurement elements.