Blogs Revisited

Looking back at my first blog post, at the beginning of the quarter, I mostly thought that bloggers were self-absorbed people with too much time on their hands who spend all day writing about their trip to the mall or lame things like that. While there still are lots of blogs like that, this quarter I learned about the varieties of different ways that people can express themselves through blogs. I didn’t know that blogs were being used for journalism, education, and political means – I had always thought that they were a personal thing. The more I learned about blogs, the more interesting they became to me and I saw that there were actually a lot of blogs out there that would be worthwhile to keep up with. Another thing I learned was that it’s hard to define what a blog really is – whether it’s an online journal, a form of journalism, or academic writing. The articles I read that attempted to define blogs always failed miserably, so I’m going to spare myself the embarrassment. All I can say on that is that a blog is whatever the person who is blogging wants it to be.

After learning all of this about the merits and diversity of blogs, I can also say I’m not really sure if they’re for me. I mean, maybe I will read blogs, but I don’t think I’m meant to be a blog writer. I wasn’t very good at all about keeping my blog updated – for me it was kind of like the journals in elementary school that I would start and then forget about two weeks later. In retrospect, it would have been really cool to have kept those journals as a kid, but I just never was up to maintaining them.

I think that blogs can be a useful tool in academia. The Educause article on educational blogging that I read for an earlier blog assignment contained some doubts about whether blogs in response to an assignment were really blogs or just fell flat because they weren’t real expressions by the authors. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Yes, we’re probably not going to be as perfectly candid in a blog as we are with our friends in person, but that just means that we’re considering our audience. Our audience for the blogs in the class consists not only of Christine, but also of pretty much everyone in the world who has internet access and who might stumble across our pages. I am definitely not going to be as candid in a blog for the world to see as I am with friends. I also think that the blogs are useful for class because it lets everyone see what everyone else is writing and what they are interested in. Otherwise, it’s not much different from having everyone write a reading response and turning it in to the teacher. The difference with blogs is that we can all see each others’ responses (and respond to them if we so choose). While it may not always happen that everyone has time to read other peoples’ blogs, at least there is that option.

In terms of a collaborative blog, I think that might be more trouble than it is worth. On the one hand, it might be cool to have all of our thoughts compiled in one place. On the other hand, what is nice about blogging is that it is usually a space just for your thoughts. Having to work with other people to negotiate a shared blog might be frustrating, and it might end up seeming more like a chat board with different posters and less like a personal blog.

Overall, I think having the blog for this class was a good idea and was a good way to have reading response, but I might have made it more compulsory to read other people’s blogs (maybe make three responses required), so at least you have to see what they’re all up to.