More quotes from sources:

Although there has been some wonderfully innovative uses of blogging by both journalists and educators I believe that the media and the academy as institutions are still asking the wrong questions about this phenomenon. The standard questions are most often posed in terms of productivity: how can this technology enable us to do what we already do but more efficiently? How can we reach more people? How can we encourage more discussion?...I believe we will only unleash the full practical potential of blogging when we pay due attention to its place in this complex field of new communicative practices. We need to look at blogging, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a broad palette of “cybercultural” practices, which provide us with both new ways of doing and new ways of thinking. (pp. 2-3)

One of the aims of using blogs in educational settings must actually be about the process itself. In the same way that one of the aims of encouraging good essay writing is to assist students to develop expressive skills that they can then apply in a range of different ways in professional or personal contexts, one of the aims of blogging ought to be to encourage cyber-literacy and an understanding of the ecology of the link in a networked society. (p.10)

I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes over the duration of a degree course, rather than blogs focused on specific assignment tasks or blogs developed for single semester units are a more congruent use of this technology. (-p.15)

O'Donnell, M. (2005) Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology. incsub.org.

http://www.incsub.org/blogtalk/images/Odonnell.doc. Accessed 3-06.

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Whether you’re a warblogger who works by day as a professional journalist or you’re a teenage high school student worried about your final exams, you do the same thing: you use your blog to link to your friends and rivals and comment on what they’re doing. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. -Hourihan (2002)

Hourihan, M. (2002, Jun. 13). What We’re Doing When We Blog. O’Reilly Web Devcenter.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html. Accessed 3-06.

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It seems clear that although blogging can and does have a significant and worthwhile educational impact, this impact does not come automatically and does not come without risks. As many writers have noted, writing a weblog appears in the first instance to be a form of publishing, but as time goes by, blogging resembles more and more a conversation. And for a conversation to be successful, it must be given a purpose and it must remain, for the most part, unconstrained.


Downes, S. (2004, Sept.-Oct.). Educational Blogging
. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5, 14–26.

http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp. Accessed 3-06.