j lee 's List: TELL: Blogging

• the use of weblogs to support learning.
• these students, when they enter postsecondary education, may have had more experience writing online for an audience than writing with a pen and paper for a teacher. Such students will bring with them a new set of skills and attitudes.
• a support tool to promote reflective analysis and the emergence of a learning community that goes beyond the school walls."
• Today, the weblog is frequently characterized (and criticized) as (only) a set of personal comments and observations
• "The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays." Bookmarks, rants and raves, news, events: all were fodder for the weblogger. Weblogs (so named in 1997 by Jorn Barger in his Robot Wisdom Web site) began to be recognized as such in 1999 when Jesse James Garrett, the editor of infosift, began compiling a list of "other sites like his." Garrett sent this list to CamWorld’s Cameron Barrett, who published it on his site. Soon after, Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about, creating the Eatonweb Portal.⁸ There is no doubt that these early lists were incomplete; weblogging was springing up around the Web more quickly than anyone realized.
• A weblog (sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) ‘logs’ all the other webpages she finds interesting. The format is normally to add the newest entry at the top of the page, so that repeat visitors can catch up by simply reading down the page until they reach a link they saw on their last visit."¹⁰
• The personal journal, also widely popular in the late 1990s, actually developed independently of weblogs. Personal journals, or online diaries, were described by Simon Firth as "direct, personal, honest, almost painful to read and yet compelling too," but by the time Firth’s article in Salon was written in July 1998, personal journals were on the verge of extinction. "Many of the biggest journal ‘fans’ began online journals themselves, and soon everyone ended up mostly writing about each other. Some of them got famous, others got resentful."¹¹
• . Blog now refers to a Web journal that comments on the news—often by criticizing the media and usually in rudely clever tones—with links to stories that back up the commentary with evidence."¹²
• Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content.
• First, teachers use blogs to replace the standard class Web page
• rganize in-class discussions.
• instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings
• students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade
• their ease of us
• Hosting services. A hosting service is a Web site
• Installed Applications.
• if for no other reason than that blogs encourage students to write
• Blogs allow readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of presidential candidates, software company executives, and magazine writers, who all, in turn, hear opinions of people they would never otherwise hear.³⁰
• writing weblogs is not for everybody. In particular, if you feel no empathy, no twinge of recognition, on reading Pilgrim’s words, then writing a weblog is probably not for you. This does not mean that you are not a part of the weblog world. It merely means that you participate in a different w
• Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting.

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