Social Software Series: Blogs I saved the best for last! I should say, though, that I've barely scratched the surface of social software. New things are cropping up all the time and there are plenty of hacks for existing services. In the fall, I plan to have a couple of my students helping me to explore new bits of social software and think about ways we might use it. And I didn't even cover things like Facebook and Friendster (social networking software). And maybe there is software out there that you're using that I don't know about. I don't know everything!

So on to blogs. Blogs have been around for a really long time (by internet standards). They have existed in some form since about 1997. They originated primarily as a collection of links, but eventually evolved into a variety of forms, from the collection of links to diary entries to political commentary to cat blogging to knitting blogs and more. Blogger, the software I'm currently using to blog, began in 1999 and was purchased by Google in 2003. Blogging got increasingly popular, both because folks like Blogger were creating tools that made it unneccesary to know html and because there suddenly became more to blog about. The 9/11 attacks generated a lot of blog entries and the wars that followed generated even more entries, including some from the soldiers themselves (known as war bloggers).

The 2004 election also brought blogging into the forefront of many people's consciousness. For the first time, bloggers were given press passes to the political conventions and they were actively pursuing news stories similar to "real" journalists. Though there is still tension between journalists and bloggers, bloggers are increasingly called upon to speak on news shows. CNN has added an "Inside the Blogs" segment to its "Inside Politics" show. It's a little silly to watch people reading blogs on tv, but it shows that mainstream media is increasingly interested in what bloggers have to say. For more about the history of blogs, see the Wikipedia entry.

I'm relatively new to blogging, having only been blogging for a little over a year. I have used blog-like things in classes since about 2001. Doug wrote a course management system that allowed students to create blog-like entries in the discussion area. I was dissatisfied with the short entries that discussion boards encouraged. The result was something that looked a lot like blogs, with expandable entries and comments. And it worked really well. The students wrote longer entries and got interesting feedback from their fellow classmates.

So how do blogs work and what's so great about them? Well, as I mentioned above, it's a medium that can encourage thoughtful (and more lengthy writing). They're very easy to use. Typically blog software requires you to set up an account and name your blog. To start blogging, you usually create a post, or a single time-stamped entry. To create this entry, I clicked a "new post" button and was presented with a web form, which I'm now typing in. When I'm finished, I will click the "publish post" button and this entry will show up on the etc web site. The nice thing about most blog software is you can keep it as simple as you want, using default templates and settings or you can customize to your hearts content. I know some of my students have used their personal blogs to experiment with web design.

So blogs allow you to easily create content that is available to the world (or not; some software allows you the option of keeping content private). But blogging is not just about creating content; it's also about reading that content. If you remember a few entries back, I talked about RSS. Most blog software automatically publishes an RSS feed for your blog. People can then include that feed in their news aggregator and be notified when your blog is updated. I follow about 100 feeds right now, about half are instructional technology- related blogs and the other half are blogs written by faculty and staff at a variety of different kinds of schools. I've followed as many as 200 feeds.

Reading blogs is a lot like going on a journey because despite most of the blogs I read being more journal-like or journalist-like, they still often included links. So I'll read a post, follow a link to an interesting post or article, which includes more links, so I follow those, and pretty soon I've gathered a lot of information about a particular topic. Services like technorati and blogpulse allow you to search for content on a particluar topic and see at a glance all the content related to that topic. Check out what they show for "educational technology". Further, you can interact with the content. Disagree with what someone says? Submit a comment. Find it interesting, want to point out something similar you wrote? Comment. Usually the author will comment back and soon you have a discussion going.

How to use blogs in classes? Lots of ideas can be found at Weblogg-ed (one of my favorite sites). Use it instead of discussion boards. Use them for writing rough drafts of papers. Use them as a reading log. Require students to read blog content and write up their thoughts on their own blog and invite the author to comment. Require students to comment on entries. Or let the students figure out a good purpose for the blog. Here's a hint: lots of students already have blogs.

Bryn Mawr is experimenting with blogs and we have a site set up for faculty, staff and students to use. I was blogging on that site until we decided to switch software. If you'd like to use that site for blogging, simply sign up for a password and start blogging. Let us know what you think.

More info and sites of interest:
Michelle Francl's blog (are you a blogging prof? Let me know!)
Tim Burke (Swarthmore)
A handout on wikis and blogs
My talk on blogging and science
My talk on weblogs and education

Blog, Blogging, education ¶ 1:51 PM, posted by Laura