Blogs
By Jay Cross
Learn to blog, blog to learn.
Blog
stands for Web-log, an informal personal Website.
Thousands of people blog every day. (Blog is both
a noun and a verb.) I’ve blogged for 18 months,
and I’m convinced that blogs are destined
to become a powerful, dirt-cheap tool for e-learning
and knowledge management.
A
blog is defined as a Website with dated entries,
usually by a single author, often accompanied by
links to other blogs that the site’s editor
visits on a regular basis. Think of a blog as one
person’s public diary or suggestion list.
Early blogs were started by Web enthusiasts who
would post links to cool stuff that they found
on the Internet. They added commentary. They began
posting daily. They read one another’s blogs.
A community culture took hold.
In
1999, blogging software arrived on the scene, enabling
anyone to post content to a Website. Generally,
blog software comes with a personal Website for
those who don’t already have one. The software
captures your words in dated entries, maintaining
a chronological archive of prior entries. In the
spirit of sharing inherent to Net culture, the
software and the personal Websites are usually
free. Currently, blogging is one of the fastest
growing trends on the Web. Nearly half a million
people have downloaded blogging software.
But
what’s so special about this way of posting
text to the Internet? Blogs are personal and unfiltered.
Real people, rather than corporate PR departments
or ad agencies, write them.
"Imagine
Hunter S. Thompson writing about the new Mac operating
system," writes Carlyle Adler in Fortune Online. "That's
the wacky spirit you can expect when you check
out the online narratives known as Weblogs. While
these sites represent both the best and worst of
Web self-publishing (the virtual tour of ugly couches
wasn't for us, nor were the angry ex-girlfriend
sites), several of the technology Weblogs are worth
checking out."
Blogging
to learn
Not
long ago, a blog pointed me to Chris Ashley's article "Weblogs: A Swiss Army Website?" He writes, "Weblog software and the Weblog model of content production
and platform interoperability are proving to be
increasingly useful and powerful, pushing and inspiring
innovative developments for, and uses of, the Web.
These areas include content, information, and knowledge
management; community building; publishing and
journalism; teaching, learning, and collaboration;
and course management systems.… Weblog software,
interfaces, and workflows are helping to realize
a Web of increasing organization and interoperability,
ease of production, improved and flexible information
flow, and interlinked accessibility…."
After
reading this, I asked Ashley to discuss the role
of the e-teacher, meta-learning, and more. Our
conversation revealed a half-dozen ways that blogging
can support learning. Essentially, blogs are a
personal writing space to organize our own thoughts
and share information with others.
Blogging
pioneer Peter
Merholz adds, "the
power of Weblogs is their ability to immediately
put form to thought. I can get an idea in my head--however
[half] baked it might be--and, in seconds, share
it with the world. Immediately, I get feedback,
refinement, stories, and so forth spurred by my
little idea. Never before was this possible."
Also,
blogs are easily linked and cross-linked to form
learning communities. A few days after we met,
Ashley emailed, "It was interesting how the next
day you posted on your blog about our talk, about
which David Carter-Tod commented on in his blog.
One of my colleagues, Raymond Yee, noticed it after
we had lunch, and I told him about our discussion.
Then, Yee wrote a post about our circle on his
blog. Of course, then I had to comment about it
on my blog. It's all an interesting little Web
that blogs make happen so quickly."
In
another setting, innovative teachers are encouraging
students to maintain class and personal school
blogs. Enthusiasm grows as students take ownership
of the content. They write, edit, review, and publish
content. They also critique each other and present
different viewpoints. Teachers make articles available
to read electronically. Blogs maintained by individual
students enable teachers to assess their students’ thinking
patterns and depth of understanding. In the future,
students may learn by assembling personal digital
portfolios.
Former
MTV-vj Adam Curry is working with teacher Peter
Ford to offer free school blogs and advice on how to use them. They note
that "Children are vain, just like adults. They
desire and require an audience for their thoughts
and achievements." they add, "The simple intuitive
nature of SchoolBlogs is precisely what's required
to allow students to express themselves on their
own terms. Children's involvement with Websites
has to be more than a posting of a few pieces of
their work on a third person's static Website for
a non-existent world to see. There's no ownership
in that. School Blogs can give children their own
soapbox, their own voice. They become habitual
writers. They are in control." (See Weblog-ed for additional accounts of
the power of blogs in schools.)
Although
everyone would like to learn a craft by apprenticing
to a world-class master, it’s not always
possible. Workshops held by master craftsmen don't
scale. By combining blogs and digital storytelling
we get the next best thing, a virtual apprenticeship.
The Center for Digital
Storytelling believes
that "in the not distant future, sharing one's
story through the multiple media of digital imagery,
text, voice, sound, music, video, and animation
will be the principle hobby of the world's people." Imagine
learning to teach by observing and learning from
stories told by a world-class instructor.
Sample
blogs
Build
a Blog
To
start your own blog, go to blogger.com. A blog
account is free! Instructions for building
your personal, company, or team blog are at www.blogger.com/howto. |
The
best way to understand blogs is to visit a few.
ElearningPost. Maish Nichani’s
blog deals with corporate learning, community building,
instructional design, knowledge management, and
so forth. Every weekday Maish links to four or
five interesting articles. Sample sources are Wired,
Chronicle of Higher Ed, Syllabus, First Monday,
Training, PBS, and CIO. Maish writes
a brief paragraph to describe each link.
I
no longer read three-quarters of the magazines
I once felt obligated to, but I do read e-learningpost
religiously to find out what I need to read. It’s
also more fun to read from a variety of voices--an
article from Fortune, a story from Learning Circuits,
or a white paper from IBM.
Research on Learning
and Performance.This
blog began as a personal tool to capture ideas
that I would later add to the e-learning page
of my company's Website. As more information
about e-learning became available, keeping
that page up-to-date became a burden. Now,
every couple of weeks I harvest worthwhile
entries from the blog to post. What sort of
content do you find on this blog? Whatever
I found interesting at the time. Essentially,
the blog is a clipping service. Love me, love
my blog. Some sample content includes
- photos
and impressions of ASTD TechKnowledge in Las
Vegas
- notes
from a Centra press event (posted during the
session)
- poetry
about meta-learning
- a
pithy quote from Cisco’s Tom Kelly
- notes
from a meeting with Chris Ashley at The Interactive
University.
My
blog contains more than a year’s worth of
items like those. The content comes in small bites.
How do people retrieve needles from this haystack?
Most use the Google search box that appears atop
each page.
Here
are a few other blogs.
Bottom
line?
For
me, blogs highlight useful information that I may
never find on my own--or think to find on my own. Cameron Barrett's
blog has taught me more about Web design than any
course. David Weinberger’s
blog mentors me on knowledge management, and often
it has me laughing out loud. Chris
Pirillo keeps
me abreast of Windows' developments. Recently, Stephen Downes began augmenting
my understanding of how people learn.
I
know what you're thinking. Why couldn’t I
get the same insight from reading a book or a magazine?
Let me count the ways. First, the informality of
blogs makes them engaging. Second, they're a time
management tool. Because bloggers read one another's
stuff, the best of the best rises to the top and
eventually appears on the handful of blogs I read.
In addiiton, blogs offer personal and even contrarian
viewpoints. Third, blogs are current. For example,
and unfortunately, I first learned about the World
Trade Center disaster on DaveNet rather than CNN.
Basically,
blogs work.
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