BLOGS & BLOGGING

To Blog or not to Blog? A Question of application to higher education.

Issac Kwok 
Blogging Montage from the cover of a report on blogging by CK

Being new to the whole blog thing, which I am sure is blatantly obvious to a seasoned blogger, I needed a little help figuring out where to start. I took a brief and free online tutorial offered through gcflearnfree.org.

The specific tutorial I accessed was:

 All About Blogs http://www.gcflearnfree.org/socialmedia/blogbasics. 

 Beginning with a general overview of blogging was helpful to me as I would consider myself somewhat uneducated on the topic. Through six modules I learned the multiple purposes for blogs, how to develop my own, and how to follow multiple other blogs in an RSS reader. I appreciated the provided worksheet on developing my own blog. I downloaded this document to start brainstorming my own ideas for a blog and then used the Blogger flowchart to choose my own blogging service. And, that is how I ended up here!

Links were provided within each section so that I could access additional information in regards to RSS readers, micro-blogging options, or blog development sites. This layout helped the tutorial be very straight forward and gave me the option as the learner to take on as much as I could handle at once.

Of course, after taking the tutorial I found one of those "forgotten" books that had fallen behind my bookcase. Coincidentally the book is titled,  Blogs,Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2010, 3rd edition) By: Will Richardson. 

 Blogs don't get enough credit as educational tools. Although I have not taken a formal course that involved blogging, I see potential for this technology in f2f as well as distance education.  Blogs and blogging are a way to bring a non-traditional platform for collaboration into the classroom. Blogs can provide a collaborative atmosphere for discussion of ideas, debate, and reflection that are all based in critical thinking skills.  A sense of community is built through blogs through ownership of ideas, expression of opinions, and demonstration of value for individual ideas.  Richardson (2010) makes the case for blogs as a tool to promote constructivism, democracy, reflection and metacognitive analysis (p.26-27). I believe blogging in education can be used beyond its typical application as a digital journal to encourage collaborative and higher level processing and discussion of content.

Take a few minutes to hear an expert, Jeremy Friedberg, PhD., speak on behalf of his experience teaching with wikis and blogs in higher education.