Weblogs are increasingly being used in education by researchers, teachers, and students.
Professors are keeping research blogs, requiring students to blog, or creating course weblogs.
Students are keeping course blogs or personal blogs. Scholars are studying and writing about the weblog phenomenon while keeping weblogs about weblogs.
What is a Weblog?
A weblog (aka Blog) is a live online journal that can be easily and instantly updated. A Blog can be a frequently posted list of interesting web sites, or a personal diary of events and thoughts, or a combination of the two (among many other things.)
The newborn publishing world of weblogs seems to be having a significant impact on digital culture, communication, education, and publication. The best proof of impact at the moment is the proliferation of Election and Political Blogs that have sprung up around presidential candidates, parties, and news agencies.
Bloggers are constantly defining and debating the definition of a weblog, as well as presenting their reasons for keeping a blog.
The pet rock of the 00's
Weblogs are everywhere. No longer the hideout of programmer nerds, weblog authors count among their ranks a Stanford law professor, a cast member of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a popular humor columnist.
In the words of weblog pioneer Dave Winer, "A Weblog allows you to easily publish a wide variety of content to the Web. You can publish written essays, annotated links, documents (Word, PDF, and PowerPoint files), graphics, and multimedia." To many this will sound a lot like a Geocities home page. Nothing new here: Geocities has been making it easy to publish to the Web for almost as long as there has been a Web. Scan a few weblogs, either those listed above or others that you may know about, and it should become clear that a weblog is exactly what it sounds like: a log that is published to the Web. The log entries are typically short, informal, and posted daily.
We can think of a weblog as a special kind of home page that has a time element. Or, even better, as a public, online diary. So why all the excitement? Everybody seems to have one and yet a weblog feels more like a pet rock than a revolution. We are particularly reminded of the excitement that accompanied the explosion of home pages in the early days of the Web. We suspect that, like home pages, the appearance of so many weblogs isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is, rather, the pervasive use of a set of technologies. Let's leave that thread for now and pick it up a little later on.
Source: Blogs in Education
