The+Basic+Questions+About+Blogging

toc
 * Basic Questions About Blogs **

=**What is a blog?**= Blog is short for weblog; it is, most basically, an online journal. With that said, blogs vary immensely by topic and style (as might be expected, given there are now well over 100 million blogs created). Some blogs are updated several times a day, others once or twice a week (or even less); posts range from a couple sentences to pages long. Some people write about their personal lives, others about their hobbies, interests, opinions, pet peeves, or all of the above; there are those that primarily collect and comment on links and news stories related to a particular topic. Many blogs have multiple contributors. =**Why should I read blogs?**= There is an amazing amount of high quality material, whether it is fact or opinion, serious or comic, that is available through blogs (unsurprisingly, there is also a great deal of low quality material, but it is easily avoidable). Much of this material is highly specialized – whether it’s [|www.fivethirtyeight.com], which provides detailed statistical analysis of political polls, or [|www.judgeabook.com], which pokes fun at books based on their covers ([|my favorite post]). The simple fact is that much of the most entertaining, informative, and interesting material being produced today is available for free through blogs. =**So how do I find this information?**= Getting started is probably the hardest step; blogs almost always will link to other blogs (either within posts or through a “Blog Roll” – a list of other blogs the author reads). Those blogs will link to still more blogs, and so a little exploring from a couple of initial blogs can result in a lengthy list of interesting blogs. So how do you find those first blogs? A simple way is to search for something that you are interested in at blogsearch.google.com. Generally, many of the results may not be what you’re looking for, but usually there will be at least a couple of interesting possibilities in the first page or two of results. Click through if the blurb looks interesting, and try reading a few of the posts to see if you find them interesting. There are a couple things to look for as you read through these posts. First, check to see how frequently posts tend to be put up – blogs that update less than a couple times a week can easily fall into complete inactivity. Secondly, glance through the comments – often, you can tell as much about the blog from the comments as from the posts. A good blog can attract an active community with a high level of discourse; of course, many wonderful blogs, for various reasons, have relatively few comments – the key is to be wary of blogs that have distasteful comments. Another way to get started is simply to do a Google search for “best blogs,” which will bring up several listings of highly successful blogs (the Technorati Top 100 and Time Top 25 are good places to start). These will tend to be some of the biggest blogs, and often there is less of a sense of community because of that, though their success is also an indicator of their quality. =**Why should I use blogs in my classroom?**= First of all, using blogs in the classroom will help students become more familiar with them and learn both the positive and negative aspects of blogging. Looking at comment boards and the communities that grow up around particular blogs can lead into interesting discussions about the nature of community and the importance of respect and civility even in an anonymous setting. Perhaps more importantly, though, blogs can enhance the material you are already teaching. I have not had the time to work on incorporating blogging into my own curriculum in the most effective way, but I have nevertheless seen many of my students get very excited about the idea of blogging and have had several interesting class discussions sparked by a blog post, as well as some interesting and thoughtful comments by students on the blog itself. A blog provides the opportunity of extending discussion beyond the classroom and posing questions that there would not otherwise be time for. =**What are the advantages of starting my own blog vs. incorporating other people’s blogs into my class?**= The advantage of starting your own blog is simple – it is customized to your class, and you can direct it in the way that you want to. In addition, your students will probably feel a greater sense of ownership in it and therefore may become more invested and interested. The disadvantage to starting your own blog is that it can be pretty time-consuming, depending on how you run it. A blog is most successful if there is regular posting on it – whether that’s every day, two or three times a week, or even once a week. Getting into the habit of posting regularly can easily be the biggest hurdle to using a blog effectively, as once you don’t get around to it for a few days, that will quickly turn into weeks and months. This is probably a good reason to have students as involved in writing the blog as possible, as it makes it easier to sustain the blog without constant posting on the teacher’s part. For a walkthrough of how to get started with a blog, click here. For more ideas on how to use your own class blog, click here. The advantage to incorporating other people’s blogs into a class is that it naturally forces students to explore the world of blogging a bit more and exposes them to different ideas and different approaches. It is probably less work overall than maintaining your own class blog, but it may require more initial research and preparation on the teacher’s part to give students a good starting point. For more ideas on using other people’s blogs in the classroom, click here.