The blog is an established social media tool, emerging in the late 1990s as a way to publish online. A wide variety of organisations have developed ways to create a blog: mostly free, generally making the process easier, with greater flexible and ultimately creating more attractive finished products. Text remains very important to many blogs, though within a given blog post it is also possible to include photos, video, sound recordings, tweets and links to other sites. The basic structure for most blogs continues to work on the sequential addition of these posts - hence their popularity as diaries, or to chart the progress of a project over time. For more information on blogs head the Wikipedia entry.
This particular post is the basis of my short talk at Edinburgh Napier's programme leaders' symposium on Thursday 12 January - welcome if you're sitting in front of me reading this from the screen! There are links below to posts that have been written for different purposes, some by me, that I'd like to talk about. We'll also look at one written by students for an autumn 2011 module.
Personal blogs for a (semi)public audience
- Dr David McGillivray (Reader in Events and Culture at UWS) on 2011 - Year of the 'Social' (Strategy)
- Me on Networks: readings, notes and links and some PhD ideas
Blogs used in modules
- My emergency lecture post with Lecturer as shoemaker
- Student blog (not linked to from this page)
Programme management
- Me on Participation, engagement, identity and employment
- What about ...a student rep blog? A space for guest speakers to contribute? Perhaps a simple online notice board?
The flexibility of the blog format lends itself to use across our work, with many examples of excellent practice publicly available. Some blogging platforms advertise the potential to use their tools in education: Posterous, Wordpress and Edublogs for example.
I look forward to your thoughts and questions, either later today or in the comments below.
Image: 'my first lolcat - in ur blog'