Dr Cihan Cobanoglu is an associate professor and Coordinator of Graduate Studies in the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. His research interests include the use of technology in the hospitality industry and education. Katerina Berezina is a PhD student in the School of Hotel and Restaurant Administration at the Oklahoma State University. Vol. 10, No. 1. ISSN: 1473-8376 www.heacademy.ac.uk/johlste PRACTICE PAPER The impact of the use of blogs on students’ assignment engagement Cihan Cobanoglu (cihan@cihan.org) Associate Professor, University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, 8350 North Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243, USA Katerina Berezina (katerina.berezina@okstate.edu) Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA DOI:10.3794/johlste.101.282 ©Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education Abstract Blogs are becoming a common marketing tool in the hospitality industry, and they also show promise as an effective educational tool. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the use of blogs on students’ engagement, as measured by the number of words used by students. An experimental design was employed with 52 students taking a particular module at a Northeast American university. Findings indicated that students who used blogs as an assignment posting platform used significantly more words, and possibly spent more time working on the assignment. Keywords: blog; education; student engagement Introduction Problem and purpose statement Even though blogs are increasingly being used in education and the hospitality industry, there is little research that has investigated the impact of blogs on students’ engagement. Student engagement is a complex phenomenon that can be described as a level of student involvement in classroom activities and exercises (Chapman, 2003; Natriello, 1984). It is considered a reliable predictor of students’ performance in different disciplines (Bredschneider, 1993; Dukelow, 1993; Finn & Cox, 1992). Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the use of blogs on students’ engagement. This is achieved by comparing students’ performance on blog and paper assignments. For the purpose of this study, a blog posting assignment was incorporated into the class curriculum and the students were asked to submit their assignments via blog during one half of the semester and in paper during another half of the semester. Blogs, also called weblogs or webblogs, are defined as “a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links” (MarketingTerms.com, 2006). In principle, blogs are not that different from a webpage. However, a blog can be created with a few clicks of a mouse, and no experience in web authoring is needed (Wu, 2005). Blogs are updated instantly and