Why Blog?

Note: this is an excerpt (my portion with slight edits) of a post originally at http://personal.gda.itesm.mx/clubinnovacion/2015/04/11/edpuzzle-and-blogging/

Blogging with WordPress

Yesterday I presented about WordPress as well as why and how our faculty and staff could use it.

If anyone would like to create a blog on campus, contact Ken who is administering our local installation of WordPress. You can contact Ken for the technical as well as creative/content sides of blogging via email at [email protected] requesting your blog (if you are the self-learning type) or make an appointment to spend 30 minutes with Ken so he can sit down with you in person and help you get started. You can make an appointment using Ken’s appointment system.

The front page of our blog platform is (currently) located at http://personal.gda.itesm.mx which displays all of the (active) blogs on our system as well as instructions about how to use this platform. If anyone would like to volunteer to improve the design or content of that “top level” blog, please contact Ken.

Definition

First a definition since an excellent question from a faculty member was “What is a Blog?” For that we turn to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary definition of blog. First the noun usage which is what we call the place that we write (what Ken will create for you to use):

blog noun

BrE /blɒɡ/

; NAmE /blɑːɡ/

(less frequent weblog) a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting

 

and now the verb definition which is what you do when you write using this tool:

blog verb

BrE /blɒɡ/

; NAmE /blɑːɡ/

Verb Forms

[intransitive, transitive] to keep a blog; to write something in a blog I will be blogging from the convention all week. Here are some reactions to the story I blogged this morning. He blogged that there wasn’t much happening. Make sure that the facts you blog about are accurate.

What to Blog About and Why?

You can blog about anything you like. I can be short, it can be long, it can include pictures or videos or anything you desire.

Of course as an employee of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, you will follow the guidelines set out in our ethics policy that all of us have signed.  I don’t mean for that statement to restrict you but to follow that ethics guideline to avoid putting a different layer of “rules” on top of what we can blog about here.

That said, I leave you with some examples from myself and other bloggers that I follow.

• Ken Bauer‘s personal blog is (mostly) about Teaching and Technology.
• Stephen Downes (pioneer in MOOCs) writes every day for 30 minutes which is the reason for the name of his blog. I link here a blog post that he wrote about “Blogs in Education“.
• D’Arcy Norman writes weekly to mostly leave a journal of what he worked on that week on his blog.
• Alan Levine is a prolific blogger and shares often about his work. I follow him particularly for his work on open education and the connected courses community.  I am hoping to have him visit us this summer along with Brian Lamb. You can find Alan’s blog here, I left the link as a search into his blog on the term “Why Blog”
• Jim Groom is another person I follow for his work on Reclaiming Education (a paper at EDUCAUSE authored by Jim and Brian Lamb). He is also the founder of ReclaimHosting which is a great hosting service for faculty and students. Jim is also a prolific blogger and I leave a link to a post he made about blogging.
• A long but excellent post about Academic Blogging by Arthur Charpentier. This is definitely worth a read and especially if you are questioning the academic value in blogging.

(Edit) The link in one of my comments below contains this excellent video put together by Alan Levin that goes to the heart of what our digital selves means in the broader context of community.