@conference {cGiro-i-Nieto10a, title = {BitSearch, the blog before the thesis}, booktitle = {VI International Congress of University Teaching and Innovation}, year = {2010}, address = {Barcelona, Catalonia}, abstract = {

This paper presents BitSearch, a web blog written by a team of thesis students where they share\ the evolution of their work. The blog is aimed at improving the communication not only between\ the advisor and the students, but also at motivating the student through the public exposure of the\ research \  development. \  Basic \  wrting \  guidelines \  are \  provided \  by \  the \  professor \  in \  order \  to\ guarantee the quality of the posts and provide good metadata for their retrieval, both by author or\ by a generic text query from a search engine. After one year online, BitSearch has published 176\ posts written by 19 students, in addition to the professor{\textquoteright}s own contributions. Statistics show\ more than 7,000 \ accesses their pages from visitors from more than 100 countries all over the\ globe. The blog tool has helped in improving the guidance on the students activity, developing a\ sense \ of \ team \ work \ among \  authors \ as \ well \ as \  a more \  progressive \ preparation \  of the \ final\ dissertation.

[CIDUI 2010 Website]

}, keywords = {blog, ~online~learning, ~web-based~tools}, isbn = {978-84-8458-324-0}, url = {http://hdl.handle.net/2117/11371}, author = {Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} }