http://wordpress.com

The ‘blog’ (which can be a regularly updated site or quite infrequent, largely static site) is often the easiest central node in a knowledge networker’s online presence – it is the one space which can be secured and managed exactly as the networker requires, even if most of their activities are found through services like twitter and their publications and distributed works are elsewhere online

The basics

WordPress.com is a “hosted version of the open source package [wordpress] where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge.” While not as commonly used as Blogger (run by Google), WordPress has the advantage that the wordpress blogging engine is probably the best in the world. Normally used (as in this website) by people who install and run their blogs themselves, wordpress.com enables anyone to get started blogging in seconds. Good control over privacy and visibility, great features for free and, for people who might then want to expand their work, easy portability out to one’s own hosting service.

The site says of itself: “You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. All you need is an email address. You’ll get your own WordPress.com address (like you.wordpress.com, you can switch to a custom address later if you’d like), a selection WordPress.com free storage of great free and customizable designs for your blog (we call them themes), 3 gigabytes of file storage (that’s about 2,500 pictures!) and all the other great features listed here. You can blog as much as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just your friends, and our premium features are completely optional.”

WordPress reflects the standards to which blogging has now been taken, after many years of development. In some ways, blogging is nothing like its original forms (web-logging), but has fused rapid, read/write web services with an emphasis on time-based updating with more traditional presentation forms to become a distinctly new kind of publication.

Blogging has become part and parcel of debate, innovation and everyday practice in the use of technologies for learning. Blogging is normally associated with reflective work (such as keeping a blog as journal), brainstorming / collaboration prior to an assignment (such as a group using a blog to plan a project and discuss it), and sometimes with teachers using it as a didactic form of content delivery, but with greater potential for dialogue through comments. Disciplines where reflection and learning-through-expression are important cognitively and culturally (languages, performance, some kinds of professional human services practice)

That large learning management systems have moved to include blogging within their complex fortresses suggests that blogging is normalised now. However, there does not seem to be much point in blogging ‘inside’ a particular system with no capacity to publish to a wider world; moreover, the quality and ease of use of blogging tools available online is so superior to that within formal educational systems that it is probably better to use wordpress or similar. Indeed, one of the key aspects of university education should be to encourage students to discover and understand their creative media literacies, no matter what their discipline or speciality. Blogging can do this, but only if it takes place in a realistic context.

Pedagogic Challenge

Students or teachers using WordPress are not going to face significant technical hurdles. However, they might question why they need to blog, or feel they didn’t want to (especially if it meant, in some way, revealing their creativity to the world). Often, these negative motivations are clearly expressed; on other occasions, they might be spoken as if they are technical – a student not wanting to blog might complain that it is too hard. And, indeed, it can be hard to translate into educational terms the ‘popular’ image of blogging (which can be seen in all its glory on the wordpress site, including major media companies, institutions, intellectual advocates as well as millions of more individual blogs).

The challenge, therefore, is to think how a blog would work for teaching and learning: such a blog might look and function very differently to a ‘normal’ blog. For example, most blogs are designed and run to be public (not least because they thereby make their producers some money via advertising). But a blog can be private, limited only to a small audience. Equally, we think of a blog as a place where one person writes and others comment: but the technology can allow several people to blog together.

There is a lot more one can do with ‘blogs’ than is currently the norm. Like many digital technologies, ‘blogging’ is malleable and full of hidden affordances. See past the standards to something new. More possibilities for blogging can be found in the KNL tool-page for Posterous. Furthermore, even the basic kinds of blogging engines within learning management systems can be productive of new approaches, for example being used as replacements for threaded discussion forums.

Alternatives

Blogger, http://blogger.com, would be the obvious alternative especially if you are exploiting or using Google’s other applications (for example gmail). For me, blogger feels like yet another Google app (there are dozens!) and hasn’t got that unique feeling to it that wordpress, a dedicated blogging engine, provides. Livejournal, http://www.livejournal.com/, might be seen as another alternative. However, while Livejournal might be a ‘blog’ in technical terms, it has developed culturally and socially as more of a space / technology for keeping journals and sharing them with specific audiences. Comparing the three forms of ‘blogging’ (WordPress, Blogger and Livejournal) helps to demonstrate how technologies, uses and users all dance together in ways that create distinct experiences from the same general form of technology.