Blogging as an educational tool

Blogs are an obvious part of modern culture. Though little a decade old, it has become part of the daily lexicon. Through their expression, they have become an example for both the creativity and diversity of the Internet. Their greatest strength is their freedom of expression on a broad breadth of topics. For the majority of blogs, authors get to write what they are truly passionate about, whether it be food, politics, or science. It is this passion for the respective topics of blog posts that makes them so unique. For example, “The Everywherist” is such a successful blog because the author of it is writing about something she is passionate about. Although it is a travel, blog, she writes about other things she enjoys such as inexplicable foreign TV shows and obnoxious airplane passangers. The freedom to write what she wants makes the blog successful because each post wants to be written. It is clear from the writing the author cares about the topic, making it appealing and interesting to read.

However, it is this freedom of expression and random thoughts that is also one of the limitations of blogs. Because of this, many of the best blogs lack the focus of traditional Internet sources such as newspapers. Their informal writing style can often seem unprofessional rather than just informal. An example of this is a I blog I analyzed recently in a previous post is the science based blog “Pharyngula”. Although the author often has excellent and well-researched reasons behind his points, he has a conversational tone that leans on the side of condescending. Because of this condescending tone and occasional divergences from the main topic, it is more difficult to take this blog post as a serious discussion of the topic. However, many of the blogs that often follow a more serious presentation of content like the Wired blogs lack the soul found in the best blogs.

In the context of the classroom, blogs can be an effective tool to teach writing if the assignments using the blog utilize the strengths of blogs, their freedom and diversity of topics. The blog assignments this quarter have been relatively lax in their requirements. However, during the entire process of writing each of these assignments, I never forgot the fact that I was writing for an assignment. At this very moment, I am thinking about how I can satisfy the requirements for this post. I believe that the writing for these assignments would be of a higher quality if the assignments gave more freedom on how they could structure the posts. By having strict guidelines on what should be in posts, the final product ends up feeling like a short essay. It would be necessary to have the blogs site proper sources just to keep the topics of discussion educated and relevant. Even with that stipulation, I believe that the posts could be of better quality because they allow the writing to take on the style of the writer. Often times, this is the very thing that gets muffled in academic writing, while blogs thrive on the writing style of the author.