Blogging pragmatics and pedagogy: An adventure in faculty development Crystal M. Ramsay & Destiny D. Aman & Barton K. Pursel Published online: 16 November 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012 Abstract As university faculty are increasingly called upon to ‘do more with less,’ particularly to teach more students with fewer resources, technology can provide viable solutions to pedagogical dilemmas. Faculty developers are frequently tasked with introducing faculty to or coaching them in the use of technological solutions. With respect to blogs, the typical show-and-tell approach to technology awareness that our faculty development center uses seemed inadequate, given the complexity of blog design, implementation, and maintenance. Instead, we found the best way to instruct university faculty in the use of blogs is to give them an opportunity to participate in a blogging community as part of a Course in College Teaching (CCT). We experimented with two different approaches in two different sections of our CCT. This paper reports on the current blogging culture in higher education, describes our specific context for utilizing blogs, shares implementation decisions and learning affordances, and forwards a set of ‘lessons learned.’ Keywords Blogs . Weblogs . Faculty development . Online pedagogy . Educational technology 1 Introduction In an era of shrinking university budgets and growing class enrollments, faculty are increasingly being asked to incorporate online components into their courses as a way to stimulate student engagement, to better connect with today’ s “millennial” gener- ation, and to make larger classes feel smaller. However, the increased expectation for faculty to keep abreast of current teaching and learning technologies is coupled with other demands on faculty time, including growing research and service commitments. As a result, many faculty find it difficult to set aside time to explore the ever-changing Educ Inf Technol (2014) 19:425–440 DOI 10.1007/s10639-012-9221-0 C. M. Ramsay (*) : D. D. Aman : B. K. Pursel Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, The Pennsylvania State University, 301 Rider Building, University Park, PA 16827, USA e-mail: cmg5@psu.edu