What I'm Reading: Who Let the Blogs Out?
Who Let the
Blogs Out?
Who Let the Blogs Out?
Blogs have brought life to the web. People have discovered that there is an easy way to have their say. Everyone gets a voice, and the strongest voices are not measured by how loud they are; power in the blogosphere comes from the democratic process of other bloggers linking to good content.
While I'm blogging about books, Biz Stone is booking about blogs. And now I'm blogging his book about blogs. I should stop before I give myself a headache.
Biz is one of the blogging pioneers. Sure, blogging has been around since the beginning of the web, and even in it's current automated form, people were doing it before him. But I've only been blogging for a few short months, so like the five year-old who thinks 30 is ready for retirement, he qualifies as a pioneer to me. Besides, he wrote a book, so he must be important.
At first, I thought I was wasting my time. The first half is about the history of blogging, which read like a casualty report of now defunct or sold-out start-up companies. Some of them are still around, but they've changed hands a few times.
I was more interested in the philosophy of blogging, rather than the history. Thankfully, my patience was rewarded with some pretty insightful observations of the whos, hows, and whys of blogging.
Blogging is an information saturated lifestyle filled with contemplation and expression. It doesn't seem like this at first, because bloggers are never expected to do much more than blast out a few posts a day as the mood strikes, but the cumulative effect is smartening. Is that a word? See how I think about these things? You can tell I'm a blogger.
The benefits of blogging -- such as increased writing proficiency and an increased ability to think critically -- are enough to keep some people happily blogging away day after day.
The biggest, and most rewarding, surprise for me came when reading the chapters on blogging for business and school. One of my short-term teaching goals is to develop a computer science curriculum for high school students that combines the best aspects of my early college course work with some more general computing concepts.After reading the section on group blogging and "gated community" blogs, I sat and wrote nearly two pages of notes to myself on how to incorporate blogs into my curriculum.
By asking students to blog weekly writing assignments, rather than turning them in to be graded, and then asking them to comment on each other's work both online and in class I hope to provide a spark for the abstract open-ended thinking that is often missing in math-related course work. More details to come as I work on fleshing out the idea.
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