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A blog - an abbreviation of the fusion of the words web and log, weblog - is a journal that can be published on the Internet. "Blogging" is what bloggers do when they write their blogs.
Blogs, like journals or diaries, are regularly updated using software that allows non-technically-minded people to write their entries, control the structure and layout of the page template, add images and weblinks, even video, in the case of videoblogs.
Blogs are increasingly commonplace on the Internet, and came into their own in 2003 during the Iraq war, where ordinary civilians were able to upstage journalists from major media outlets by reporting 'on the ground' rather than 'embedded'.
According to a recent Pew survey, 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% last year, and now stands at 27% of internet users; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, the survey found, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is. What is an Educational Blog?
An educational blog is typically a journal kept by a teacher, professor, researcher, or student relating to their experiences of their work, institutions, or their field of expertise. Like a journal, blog entries are normally organized chronologically. Through blogs, the Internet has allowed educators and students in specific niches to express and share their work without resorting to high entry-bar conventional media.
For an educator, a regular blog would be a reflective tool, a publicly-shared way to describe work-in-progress, record life on the job, and comment on events, conferences, classes, lectures or other educators' research, blogs or publications.
For students though, blogs can be all those things, but inasmuch as a teacher or professor can assign blogs as homework, educational blogging has become a new type of learning exercise that allows students to articulate their response to class material and then readily share it with the teacher, the rest of the class, and indeed, the rest of the world.
An emerging trend in blogging is to use video from a DV camera which is imported and formatted for the Internet using basic video editing software. A videoblog - or 'vog' - offers a visual commentary which can include interviews, talking heads, documentaries of all types. Find out more about vogging here.
Another popular online technology, known as Wikis, is akin to a communal blog. A wiki is equivalent to blogging in that it is entirely open to the public to change, update and modify an entry. Editorial rigour is maintained by the trust principle amongst the community of users; erroneous postings are usually quickly corrected by regular users. A popular wiki can be seen at Wikipedia.
This is not to say that blogs or wikis are not susceptible to abuse. Many blogs include an area for making comments, and bloggers frequently report that the comments sections of their blogs have been 'invaded' by spammers or unwanted advertisers. Nevertheless, this is perceived as a small price to pay for access to such a powerful reflective, educational tool.
Who's doing what in educational blogging?
The Educational Blog Awards for 2004 recognizes some of the most popular, prolific and widely read educational bloggers. This year's winner was Pharangula, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris. A glance at Pharangula's current blog, at the time of writing this article, draws the reader into the ongoing controversy between evolutionsts and creationists. Other honorable mentions went to the Online Learning Daily, which covers developments in instructional technology, Weblogg-ed, Early Modern Notes, and The Life and Times of a History PhD Student. Find those links here.
Example: Blogs and ESL
Another example of an effective way to use educational blogs is in the case of language learning, or English as a Second Language. Blogs can be used in a strcutured way by language learners to practise their writing, research and reading skills, and to support them in communicating their work, collaboirating with others, and sharing the results across the Internet.
One Yahoo! online forum includes a six-week workshop in the use of blogs in English language teaching, or ESL. The target audience is teachers with basic internet skills who are interested in using blogs. The forum includes weeky chats with participants from around the world, with discussions of blogging tools, personalization and RSS, images and sound in blogs, collaborative projects, blogging communities, and E-portfolios.
Questions about quality arise in any discussion about blogging and Internet publishing. The quality of the content found in blogs can vary widely in terms of accuracy, interest, usefulness and relevance. This is especially important in the case of education, as it compels both educators and students to be more discriminating and selective in their research and writing. In spite of this concern however, blogging is here to stay in the classroom of the future.
Find out more
BBC article on the uptake of blogs:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4194669.stm
Blog tools news:
http://educational.blogs.com/
Pew blog usage report
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp
by Robert Whelan
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