Pretty interesting article about the impact on weblogs…highlights a student’s personal use in the lead. I like this quote: “[weblogs are] helping the Internet make good on some of its heady promises of personal empowerment.” I’m thinking that can be true in the classroom as well, empowering teachers and students to articulate and develop ideas and reflections. Other snippets:
- “One blog is written in the voice of Julius Caesar, tracking the Roman’s progress as he takes on Gaul.” How about a character journal is a lit course?
- “But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”
- “‘In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people on the Web,’ says David Weinberger, author of ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined,’ an incisive book about the Net.”
- ” The genius of this scheme is that you can get going without any mental heavy lifting.” E-Z.
- “The next wave seems to be corporate blogs.” And what comes after that?
Two things that jump out at me in this article:
1) As Meg H. points out “You don’t have to come up with a whole essay.” This is crucial for me since many of my students are new learners of English. I really see blogs as a way to solve many of my struggles to publish to the web in the past due to the lack of “heavy mental lifting”.
2) “Blogging is a social phenomenon”. Lonely, isolated web pages have little appeal for me. Yeah, we all want them to publish but having others comment on what you’ve written is taking it to a different level.