Blogging Along

I started by reading blogs at livejournal.com. Click 'Search' for Username (leave the text box blank) and you will get a random blog. I got teen blogs including Cyrillic teen blogs out of Russia.

Wow. Teen life exposed. Was this my life at thirteen (sixteen, eighteen, whatever)? I certainly didn't have a way to tell the world about it.

With all the teen action, I was a somewhat nervous about posting to livejournal. Are you judged by the company you keep?

I did learn a new acronym for chats: STFU. I'll let the reader find meaning for it.

Still blog trolling. It's a fascinating world. You are peeking into people's lives. ("I think I'll stay home from school today. Can't wait to see Max tonight. I wish my dad would leave me alone.") It's eerie.

I have found William Gibson's blog. He is the author of Neuromancer along with a slew of other books. One of my favorite authors.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp

He writes about blogging compared to writing a novel.

Technorati says it is watching 1,678,635 weblogs. Here you can see the Top 100 blogs, ranked by blogs that link to the site. There are some familiar faces here like Slashdot and the DrudgeReport.

I seek a site to blog from. I checked livejournal.com and blogspot.com. Finally I stumbled on blogger.com. I realized I had visited here before in the early days of blogging but I never created a blog. Well here it is.

I've decided to host at my own site (pfhyper.com). I think you could host at your U of M Web space if you want. The advantage of hosting off the blog site itself is no advertisements.

Blog Tips

Use a text editor and then copy-paste to your blog. At blogger.com at least, it's a two or three step process to save your draft.

In terms of our class - CI5361 -- I plan on using this blog to brainstorm ideas and to report on my own WebQuests for knowledge. I hope to not spend a lot of time editing to make it sound better. But I do hope it's of interest to the rest of you as we continue with the class. If it's not, don't tell me.

Blogs in Education

Google it! "Blogs in Education" gives me http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/ (University of Houston) where it emphatically states that "The use of blogs in instructional settings is limited only by your imagination." So there you have it. (This site has some good links and info about blogs and education.)

Blogs can be used for HTML-less publishing, it also says. I really like that idea. Publishing a Web site (as we will all soon discover) is painful. I don't think there is any really easy way to do it and no tool that is simple to use. So why not blog?

A teacher can provide information for the class with a blog along with links to other sites on the Web. Some blog sites allow you to display pictures.

The blog structure would allow for posting as you find the information. This is so much easier with blogs than with Web sites.

Collaborative Blogging

In upper grades, a collaborative blog could be established with both students and teachers posting to the same blog and sharing knowledge and findings. It would be nice for this blog to allow separate user names and passwords for all posters but I don't know if that's available in a free format. Most blogs can be private and allow only who you want to allow.

A collaborative blog would be a useful tool in team learning projects to manage knowledge. Sort of a free form data base. Keep all your links and notes in one place. Teachers could check on team progress from time to time and teams could share with other teams.

(Check http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Collaborative/ for more on collaborative blogs.)
- posted by Peter Fleck @ Permalink 11:19 PM [to Del.icio.us]