An Educational Blogging Revolution

What Blogs Are and What They Can Do For Students

By: Eric Durrand

Leading dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster had recently announced the word "blog" was the most looked-up word of the year 2004. In a recent article BBC had gone so far as to deem 2004 "the year of the blog". Technorati, a blog analysis firm, estimated the current number of blogs at 4.8 million and said the number of blogs was doubled every 5.5 months for the past 18 months.

But what is a blog? To quote Merriam-Webster, it is: "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." Blog, a noun and shorthand for Web-log, is more than a kind of website. It is considered by many as nothing short of a cultural revolution, in which everyone gets to write and publish his own thoughts and ideas, and share them with others online. In schools, it can provide students with an audience and writing experience, and teachers with a platform to publish course-related materials and promote online debates.

The first weblog on record was probably that of Marc Andreesen, one of the "founding fathers" of the Internet, who invented the first web browser, called Mosaic - a precursor of both Netscape and Internet Explorer. His What's New list, which was launched on June 1993, covered new and interesting websites on the young World Wide Web, and used a format very similar to today's blogs.

The blog format didn't catch on very quickly, and up until 1998 blogs were few and scattered. The buzz began on August 1999, when a company called Pyra (recently purchased by Google) released Blogger.com, a free service that offered every internet user the opportunity to start his own personal journal on the web. Blogs soon grew in popularity, and became common among savvy internet users.

Services like TypePad, LiveJournal, BlogCity, and the new MSN Spaces have since sprung up, offering the laymen a set of friendly tools to manage their own online journal, together with photo albums, lists of favorite books, websites, and music. Visitors in most blogs can add their own comments, and engage in discussion with the blog's author and other readers. An advanced option like TrackBack allows a visitor to form a bi-directional link between an article in someone else's blog and a response in his own blog, and tools like XML or RSS allow users to syndicate their content to subscribers and to other websites.

So how can a blog contribute to a student's education? First and foremost, it provides an enormous incentive to write: "Often dismissed as merely 'vanity' websites, critics slate their simplicity", writes Peter Ford, a former teacher at the British School of Amsterdam and the founder of SchoolBlogs.com, "Yet it is precisely these two factors that are the keys to their potential. Children are vain, just like adults. They desire and require an audience for their thoughts and achievements. Every teaching college in the world extols the virtues of providing students with an audience."

Blogs allow students to express themselves in their own way, says Ford, which explains their growing popularity among teenagers. But not only students are finding the blogs useful - a recent article in the New York Times revealed a new and interesting trend - using blogs as a billboard for the class, a course, or even the school's library. Blogs make it a snap to post assignments, announcements, and topics for discussion, which every student can access simply by typing a web address.

New York's own East Side Community High School manages several blogs as a means to encourage discussion and self-expression among the students, including debate on topics as varied as abortion, drug addiction, and dealing with death in the family. High schools are not the only educational institutions using blogs. Just visit this kindergarten's blog to see a simple demonstration of the versatility of blogging. Or meet Lauren Bruce, a Language Arts teacher and a single mom, who had gone so far as to open a blog for her four-year-old son! Through dictating to his mother into this blog, she hopes, Ethan will improve his recall and memory, word choice and syntax, self-esteem, and personal history awareness - as well as share his thoughts with distant family members.

  Many nonprofit groups are also beginning to see the educational benefits of blogging. The Educational Bloggers Network (EBN), for instance, is a growing community of teachers and education professionals who use blogs for teaching. The network assists members to advance blog integration in education through advise, tools, and community support. EdBlogger Praxis is one of the member blogs of EBN, listing and promoting dozens of education-oriented blogs. An organization called INCSUB has even announced The EduBlog Award, an award for the best educational blog in each of several categories.

Like E-Mail, the blogging revolution is a cultural as well as technological revolution. And like E-Mail, it encourages millions of people to sit down and write, in their own words. There are, of course, many things a blog cannot do. It gives the student the incentive to write, but it does not provide him with knowledge of what he is writing about. It helps him reach a large audience, but does not teach him to captivate it through clear and insightful commentary. And it most certainly doesn't help him improve the grammar, syntax, or logical flow of his articles. For that, we still need good old-fashioned classes and teachers.

But even though a blog cannot and should not replace old fashioned class assignments, it is a lovely addition, and a tool that provides both students and teachers with an opportunity to develop their ideas and writings, and share them with others around the world.