Blogs are usually chronological documents often compared to a diary or journal, written daily, or at least regularly. Once you have posted to the blog you make only minor amendments.
When you want to blog on a new topic you create a new posting which is typically of the same format as your previous one. You determine how many postings are visible on the home page on your blog, the rest are available by an archiving system or by searching. Blogs are fairly typically written by individuals although they may be created by a team. The blog may be kept in draft form (invisible) until the final bit is written and then it is published. Once the blog is published then the postings are available by RSS feed.
Wikis are often favoured by teachers because they can be much more 
collaborative. They basically build up an online booklet. It is not so much about individual entries, but documents that everybody can add to and edit. They can lend themselves to branching documents (like Wikipedia). Individuals can work on an individual page in a wiki and then link it to a page created by someone else.
Changes in a wiki can be monitored in a number of ways, although each person with editing rights to the wiki can overwrite data created by others.
Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/3doug/550379161/
Reasons for blogging
- Reflection, defining who you are
- Clarification of ideas, impetus for research, and then presentation of findings
- Information for a wider audience, communication with a target community
- The beginning of a conversation: often a blogger leaves the initial posting open ended, encouraging readers to make comments on the ideas presented.
- Creating a semi-permanent document to stand as published with minimal modification.
- Bloggers often become part of a blogging community, people who comment on each other’s ideas and share knowledge and links to other ideas. Bloggers monitor the RSS feeds of like minds. Blogging Community in edna Groups – bloggers learning from each other.
- Professional development.
- Blog postings can have embedded photos or videos, hyperlinks
- Many people have more than one blog – targeted at different audiences, created for different purposes.
Ways of using a blog
- Personal reflective journal
- this was the original concept but web 2.0 has taken it far beyond that as most blogging tools have interactive capability - Developing a sense of community among teachers - catharsis
- Publish a school or class newsletter
- Class blog accessible to parents
- Individual Teacher blog
- Class “group” – small number of students – several of these in one class – collaborative
- Individual student blogs
- Book review blog for the library
- Blogs could be accessible only to a defined group or to a wider community
Where can you set up a blog? – there are over 40 free blogging tools
- Moodle (in your own organisation)
- – currently does not have a comment attached to the blog, although there will be one in Moodle 2.0;
- Open University have released a plugin with moderation and commenting
- Me.edu.au has a blogging tool for educators
- Edublogs: currently have nearly 230,000 blogs
- There is a commercial Edublogs campus
- Blogger (blogspot)
- Wordpress
- Live Journal
- Typepad
Where can you set up a wiki?
- Moodle has a wiki tool- a bit clunky - might be better to look for a plug in to use with students
- Wikispaces: 1,500,000 members, 600,000 wikis
- Wikis for education – K-12 Plus, ad-free
- PBWiki: has a PBwiki for Classrooms
Some of the problems teachers have raised
- Even when a blog or a wiki is set for “literacy” activities: the problem of assessment, particularly in the wiki
- Blocking of blog sites by systems
- Duty of care: monitoring what students write about themselves in blogs, and the comments that they write on the blogs of others.
A Scattering of Blogs – just a sample list.
- Hey Jude: http://heyjude.wordpress.com/
- Teaching Generation Z: Graham Wegner: http://gwegner.edublogs.org/
- The Edublogger: Sue Waters: http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/
- The Bamboo Project: Michele Martin: http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/
- The Global Teacher: WEB 2.0 Community and Research Project: http://globalteacher.org.au/
- Danah Boyd: http://www.danah.org blog: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
- Christopher. D. Sessums: http://eduspaces.net/csessums/bloglog
- Future Lab: http://flux.futurelab.org.uk/
- The Great Beyond: a blog about science. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/
- My Other Blog: John Pearce: http://johnp.wordpress.com/
- Betchablog: http://betch.edublogs.org/
- Room22: http://pamthompson.edublogs.org
- Sue Wyatt’s Tas Teach: http://tasteach.edublogs.org/
5 Comments
Thanks for this post. It’s a great summary and one I can use in my work I am doing on digital literacy for midwives. cheers Sarah
‘Moodle has a wiki tool- a bit clunky - might be better to look for a plug in to use with students’
Yes, the standard Moodle wiki is limited in some ways - but the way it allows you to control who can read and write to a wiki can be very useful. I wrote about this here:
http://www.verso.co.nz/pedagogy/5/wikis-in-moodle-and-the-read-write-matrix/
I suggest to teachers that it’s worth checking out the Moodle wiki to see if it’ll do what they want ‘out of the box’ as many find it has all the features they need.
Thanks for your post - I’ll be linking to this as a very useful professional development resource!
Paul
Thanks for including me on your list, Kerrie. At present I am running a student blogging competition with students from 8 countries including about 20 classes and over 180 individual students. All information is on my class blog rather than my personal one.
I’m often asked by clients about these solutions and this is a nice simple explanation. Thanks.
I like very much wiki, for me it’s a Knowledge open source ..
On blog, people say all or nothing, it’s not every time true
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