Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

25 – Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
a wide range of contexts and users. We recommend that
educators wishing to take things further also take a look
at the section following this one on wikis, which shows
how a class with a solid foundation in blogging might
profit from using this more collaborative tool.
WHAT ARE BLOGS?
For the purposes of this section, we will use the following
definition of a blog, which appeared in a 1999 Salon.com
column:
“Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated
by individuals who compile chronological lists of
links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with
information, editorializing and personal asides. A
good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time
improvisation, with pointers to interesting events,
pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the
Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff
sinks to the bottom.” (Rosenberg, 1999, para. 6)
The name weblog, now generally shortened to blog, is
a portmanteau suggesting a logbook that is available
through the Web. It is an outgrowth of programmers’
logs in which actions are recorded in chronological order
to help with troubleshooting and debugging. A
variation of this practice involves programmers, often
working in teams whose members are located in different
time zones, themselves recording their own observations
as web-accessible ‘diaries’. Because this was all
taking place on the Web, it was a logical step to add
links to web pages, which conform to previous conceptual
framings of footnotes as well as leveraging the
power of social networks, in that following links from a
person’s weblog can introduce readers to material they
would never find on their own.
As this process became a social phenomenon, software
developers began creating blog software with features
to improve ease of use, and entrepreneurs entered
into the field of providing free blogs. Modifications to
the software allow more advanced features like group
blogging (where a group of people assume authorship),
tags or categories (where posts are classified according
to theme and for which custom views are available), and
comments (where people reading a blog can comment
on a particular post or simply communicate with the
author or other readers), and these features have by now
become all but standard.
Why did blogging become such a social phenomenon?
We suggest that the main reason is that a blog
conforms to a certain mental model of writing (the individual
diary) that was built upon and extended. This
may explain why wikis, the development of which predates
blogs, have not caught on so quickly or widely.
Blogs also benefited from a cycle of popularity, innovation,
and commercial potential. Initial popularity triggered
interest from developers, which led to rapid
innovation and further popularity, in turn increasing the
attraction of blogs to advertisers. This led to commercial
blog services, which in turn created a critical mass of
blogs as well as a host of other services and capabilities
(photo-sharing, RSS feeds, trackback, tagging), which
continues to feed the development of blogs. The result is
a rich ecosystem of tools and services, ready to be exploited
by educators.
The situation is good and getting better, though there
is one proviso: There is not one ready-made and proven
solution for every situation, so educators need to be
willing to experiment with various tools and services to
exploit blogs to their full potential.
SIGNING UP FOR A BLOG
Currently, there are many blogging services, ranging
from the free and very large Blogger (formerly BlogSpot)
with an estimated 14 million blogs as of July 2006 (Riley,
2006) and WordPress.com to smaller hosting services
such as Squarespace. It is beyond the scope of this section
to cover all of the possible alternatives for starting a blog,
but creating a generic example and stepping through the
sign-up procedure can establish some points of reference.
For this example, we will use screenshots of Blogger
(http://www.blogger.com/) to illustrate the process.
Entry page for Blogger
Education for a Digital World 383