Looking at Blogs through new educator glasses

I have a newly discovered reverence for blogging in education now. I think I was stuck in the early blogs era that had too much of the look and appeal of personal journaling and opinion spouting for me to consider it being a good educator's tool. However, due to the research and exploration from Denvy’s assignment prompts, I discovered four (major) new understandings of blogs in education today:

• there are very interesting, exciting, progressive and information-filled blogs created by educators for educators

• there are some very interesting, exciting, progressive and information-filled blogs created by educators for students (even in higher education – my platform)

• there are some really cool student-created blogs that example assignment ideas (that most notably do not impose additional reading and assessment time for instructors)

• there are ever-improving and very cool blog tools, widgets, design plug-ins (that you classmates!) that assist both educators and students in creating blogs that can be a very rich environment for learning

Although one still needs to wade through sea of poorly designed, hot-air soap-box styled, and catch-all blog-because-I-can blogs, I can continue to visit the great blogs that I’ve found and be confident that if I continue to explore and search for rich content-filled blogs I, fellow faculty, and my students can learn from, that I will in fact find many.

Concurrently with this course, I also worked on learning how to write CSS code that makes creating a blog from scratch fairly easy. I also took an information design course that has helped me learn how to design information based on goals and messages. I can now take the best information of all the great blogs and design a blog that delivers what I promise it will – rewarding it’s readers. My future students will also benefit from my new knowledge and experience in:

• searching for
• reading
• subscribing
• designing
• posting

Thank you Denvy and classmates! Aloha!