Blog Heaven

Yes, my title is correct folks, I am in blog heaven.  I don't mind saying that I am addicted to them. How so? Below are a couple of links to the ones I am/have been the author of:

BTEC Students Web Design Course
The blog above is for a course I am currently teaching to year 13 students.  I am hoping that this blog will act as a form of advertising.  Potential students can visit this blog on a weekly basis to see what happens on the course and what students think to it.

Teachers International Development Programme
This blog shows the learning journey of 10 teachers (myself included) that went to visit schools in Latvia. I set up this blog because I wanted the friends and families of those of us on the trip to follow our journey. We have found out that this blog has been visited by the Latvian Tourist Board and some departments of the Latvian Government.

Did you know that there are 173,628,779 known blogs as of the date of this post.  If you visit http://www.blogpulse.com/ you'll find loads of similar facts. For those that are not quite sure what a blog is (please don't think I'm being patronising) here is a simple animated explanation from Common Craft:



So what is the big deal about blogging?  Well, one advantage to blogging writes Richardson (2010) is that it takes as much skill as sending an email (honest Sue, it's true:-))) and this according to Davies, Merchant (2009) is one of the many motives for student bloggers. Blogs also permit the teacher (and students) to post links to relevant material including images and videos (as shown above) which creates learning opportunities for both the student and teacher. However, if you do have 30 students contributing to a blog (or, as in our case 4 with myself, Sue, Karen and Geoff) tracking the entries of these contributors can become a daunting task if not planned and managed well writes Cox, King (2011) and can become a disadvantage of blogging. Let's hope we can keep up with ours on a weekly basis because it is exciting when the comments do come in.

Finally for this post, Maddux, LaMont, Johnson (2005) writes that the flexible informal nature of blogs can be a disadvantage to blogs in terms of maintaining focus and fostering deep, critical thinking. This is an important point to note and I will aim to address this in the third post which will reflect on the paper of Laurillard (1999).

Ta ta for now.