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The bell rings, and thehalls of Institut St-Joseph in QuebecCity echo the clattero f t h e f i f t h - a n dsixth-graders. Sometake their chairs inthe more traditional

classroom on the lower floor. Othersattend to their projects in the large, openactivity room upstairs, pausing perhapsto study one of the chess games hang-ing on the wall before meeting in groupsto plan the current project. A thirdgroup steps up a half flight of stairs intothe small narrow room at the front ofthe building, one wall lined with picturesand plastercine models of imaginedaliens, the other with a bank of Applecomputers.

This last group of students, eight or soat a time, fire up their browsers and loginto their cyberportfolios, a publicationspace that Principal Mario Asselin calls a“virtual extension of the classroom.”1

This virtual space is composed of three

sets of weblogs, or blogs: a classroom Webspace, where announcements are dis-played and work of common interested isposted; a public, personal communica-tion zone, where students post the resultsof their work or reflection; and a privatepersonal space, reserved for students’thoughts and teacher guidance.

Dominic Ouellet-Tremblay, a fifth-grade student at St-Joseph, writes: “Theblogs give us a chance to communicatebetween us and motivate us to writemore. When we publish on our blog, peo-ple from the entire world can respond byusing the comments link. This way, theycan ask questions or simply tell us whatthey like. We can then know if people likewhat we write and this indicate[s to] uswhat to do better. By reading these com-ments, we can know our weaknesses andour talents. Blogging is an opportunity toexchange our point of view with the restof the world not just people in our imme-diate environment.”2

The students at St-Joseph are reflec-tive of a trend that is sweeping the world

of online learning: the use of weblogs tosupport learning. And even though theworld of fifth grade may seem remote toeducators in the college and universitysystem, these students, when they enterpostsecondary education, may have hadmore experience writing online for anaudience than writing with a pen andpaper for a teacher. Such students willbring with them a new set of skills andattitudes.

Writes Asselin in his own blog, Mariotout de go: “The school administration’s ob-jective with this weblog initiative was tooffer students and teachers a support toolto promote reflective analysis and theemergence of a learning community thatgoes beyond the school walls.”3 The blogsfit the bill perfectly. “I see more than 2,000posts and nearly 3,000 comments,” saysAsselin. “Because of that, I am able toname what they do and see where it comesfrom. I can also figure out the directionsthey are taking and how they do it.”4

Institut St-Joseph is an unassuming,yellow-brick school on a tree-lined road

14 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � September/October 2004

By Stephen Downes

© 2004 S tephen Downes

Stephen Downes (http://www.downes.ca) is a Senior Researcher with the E-Learning Research Group, National Research Council Canada, Monc-ton, New Brunswick.

BloggingE D U C A T I O N A L

“I think it’s the most beautiful tool of the worldand it allows us the most magic thing...”—Florence Dassylva-Simard, fifth-grade student

I l lus t ra t ion by Jason Howard S ta t ts , © 2004

in the west side of Quebec City. The stu-dents inside may be early adopters, butthey are far from alone in their use ofblogs. The phenomenon known as blog-ging, or weblogging, is sweeping the In-ternet. A February 2004 report publishedby the Pew Internet & American LifeProject noted that at least 3 millionAmericans have created blogs, withsimilar numbers being seen world-wide.5 And schools have not been im-mune from this trend. While nobodycan say for sure just how many studentsare blogging, inside the classroom orout, it seems clear that their numbersare equally impressive.

In his day job, Will Richardson isthe supervisor of instructional tech-nology at Hunterdon Central RegionalHigh School in Flemington, New Jersey.But online, Richardson is known as oneof the leading proponents of blogging ineducation and the maintainer of theWeblogg-Ed Web site. “More and moreteachers and schools are starting to ex-periment with the technology as a way tocommunicate with students and par-ents,” he writes. Blogs are used to “archiveand publish student work, learn with far-flung collaborators, and ‘manage’ theknowledge that members of the schoolcommunity create.”6

And the number of educational blog-gers is growing daily. The EducationalBloggers Network, sponsored by the BayArea Writing Project and Weblogger.com,is a community of some 120 teachers andeducators involved in blogging. The fol-lowing announcement on the site, by SanDiego State University’s Bernie Dodge, istypical: “It’s that time of semester again.Tonight I introduced blogging to my classof pre-service English and foreign lan-guage teachers.” The result: twenty-eightnew student blogs.7 This same pattern isbeing repeated in schools and universi-ties across the United States and aroundthe world.

In my own case, blogging evolved

from three major directions. First, theblog that began as Stephen’s Web (http://www.downes.ca) and that eventually be-came OLDaily originated as a bettermeans for me to store bookmarks. Sec-ond, the blog that became NewsTrolls orig-inated as a series of posts by Pasty Drone.Called Media Rant News Trolls, these wereposted on the old Hotwired Threads.When eight of us, including Pasty andmyself, decided to leave the site in 1998,we adopted Pasty’s format and name. Andthird, when I created The Brandon Pagessite, about the city of Brandon, I created ablogging tool to announce new links andevents.

Today, the weblog is frequently char-acterized (and criticized) as (only) a set ofpersonal comments and observations. Alook at the history of weblogging showsthat this isn’t the case. As Rebecca Bloodobserves: “The original weblogs werelink-driven sites. Each was a mixture inunique proportions of links, commen-tary, and personal thoughts and essays.”Bookmarks, rants and raves, news, events:all were fodder for the weblogger.Weblogs (so named in 1997 by JornBarger in his Robot Wisdom Web site)began to be recognized as such in 1999when Jesse James Garrett, the editor of in-fosift, began compiling a list of “other siteslike his.” Garrett sent this list to Cam-World’s Cameron Barrett, who publishedit on his site. Soon after, Brigitte Eatoncompiled a list of every weblog she knewabout, creating the Eatonweb Portal.8 Thereis no doubt that these early lists were in-complete; weblogging was springing uparound the Web more quickly than any-one realized.

Many writers assert that blogs cameinto their own only after the events ofSeptember 11, 2001. As Charles Cooperwrites, “If you were scouring the Internetfor news and context during those firstterrible hours, you could have done a lotworse than eavesdropping on the free-wheeling mini-universe of Web logs

chockablock with first-hand info andspirited commentary about what wasgoing on. . . . For my money, some of thebest stuff was being served up in thismost unlikely venue.”9

I myself spent the two days following9/11 updating NewsTrolls. Although wehad covered and commented on the techboom, world events, and a presidentialelection, the events of September 11brought home to me the immediacy ofblogging. We ran ongoing coverage, sub-mitted via SMS to my e-mail, as one of ourown made her way from the dust and de-bris of New York’s financial district to herhome on the west side. Blogging not onlyallowed us access to the event; it made uspart of the event. And with that, the formhad indeed finally come into its own.

Barger’s original definition of a weblogreads as follows: “A weblog (sometimescalled a blog or a newspage or a filter) is awebpage where a weblogger (sometimescalled a blogger, or a pre-surfer) ‘logs’ allthe other webpages she finds interesting.The format is normally to add the newestentry at the top of the page, so that repeatvisitors can catch up by simply readingdown the page until they reach a link theysaw on their last visit.”10

The personal journal, also widelypopular in the late 1990s, actually devel-oped independently of weblogs. Personaljournals, or online diaries, were de-scribed by Simon Firth as “direct, per-sonal, honest, almost painful to read andyet compelling too,” but by the timeFirth’s article in Salon was written in July1998, personal journals were on the vergeof extinction. “Many of the biggest jour-nal ‘fans’ began online journals them-selves, and soon everyone ended upmostly writing about each other. Some ofthem got famous, others got resentful.”11

The confusion between these twodistinct forms is evident in the observ-ations of commentators such as Cather-ine Seipp. “In general, ‘blog’ used tomean a personal online diary, typically

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While nobody can say for sure just how manystudents are blogging, inside the classroomor out, it seems clear that their numbers areimpressive.

concerned with boyfriend problems ortechie news,” she writes. “But after Sep-tember 11, a slew of new or refocusedmedia junkie/political sites reshaped theentire Internet media landscape. Blognow refers to a Web journal that com-ments on the news—often by criticizingthe media and usually in rudely clevertones—with links to stories that back upthe commentary with evidence.”12

But this definition—which tries tocharacterize the blog by what it con-tains—seems to miss the point. Com-menting on Seipp’s statement, MegHourihan takes a different approach:“Whether you’re a warblogger who worksby day as a professional journalist oryou’re a teenage high school student wor-ried about your final exams, you do thesame thing: you use your blog to link toyour friends and rivals and comment onwhat they’re doing. Blog posts are short,informal, sometimes controversial, andsometimes deeply personal, no matterwhat topic they approach.”13 The defini-tions of blogging offered by bloggers, asopposed to those offered by externalcommentators, follow this theme. Blog-ging is something defined by format andprocess, not by content.

A blog, therefore, is and has alwaysbeen more than the online equivalent of apersonal journal. Though consisting ofregular (and often dated) updates, theblog adds to the form of the diary by in-corporating the best features of hyper-text: the capacity to link to new and usefulresources. But a blog is also characterizedby its reflection of a personal style, andthis style may be reflected in either thewriting or the selection of links passedalong to readers. Blogs are, in their purestform, the core of what has come to becalled personal publishing.

In the hands of teachers and students,blogs become something more again. TheWeb is by now a familiar piece of the edu-cational landscape, and for those siteswhere personal publishing or chronolog-

ically ordered content would be useful,blogs have stepped to the fore. CrookedTimber’s Henry Farrell identifies fivemajor uses for blogs in education.14

First, teachers use blogs to replace thestandard class Web page. Instructors postclass times and rules, assignment notifi-cations, suggested readings, and exer-cises. Aside from the ordering of materialby date, students would find nothing un-usual in this use of the blog. The instruc-tor, however, finds that the use of blog-ging software makes this previouslyodious chore much simpler.

Second, and often accompanying thefirst, instructors begin to link to Internetitems that relate to their course. MesaCommunity College’s Rick Effland, forexample, maintains a blog to pass alonglinks and comments about topics in ar-chaeology.15 Though Mesa’s archaeologyWeb pages have been around since 1995,blogging allows Effland to write what arein essence short essays directed specifi-cally toward his students. Effland’s en-tries are not mere annotations of interest-ing links. They effectively model hisapproach and interest in archaeology forhis students.

Third, blogs are used to organize in-class discussions. At the State Universityof New York at Buffalo, for example,Alexander Halavais added a blog to hismedia law class of about 180 students.Course credit was awarded for online dis-cussion, with topics ranging from theFirst Amendment to libel to Irish law re-form. As the course wound down with adiscussion of nude bikers, Halavais ques-tioned whether he would continue theblog the following year because of theworkload, but students were enthusiasticin their comments.16

Mireille Guay, an instructor at St-Joseph, notes: “The conversation possi-ble on the weblog is also an amazing toolto develop our community of learners.The students get to know each other bet-ter by visiting and reading blogs from

other students. They discover, in a non-threatening way, their similarities and dif-ferences. The student who usually talksvery loud in the classroom and the stu-dent who is very timid have the samewriting space to voice their opinion. Itputs students in a situation of equity.”17

Fourth, some instructors are usingblogs to organize class seminars and toprovide summaries of readings. Used inthis way, the blogs become “groupblogs”—that is, individual blogs authoredby a group of people. Farrell notes: “It be-comes much easier for the professor andstudents to access the readings for a par-ticular week—and if you make sure thatpeople are organized about how they doit, the summaries will effectively filethemselves.”18

Finally, fifth, students may be asked towrite their own blogs as part of theircourse grade. Educational TechnologistLane Dunlop wrote about one class atCornell College: “Each day the studentsread a chunk of a book and post two para-graphs of their thoughts on the reading.”In another class, French 304, studentswere given a similar exercise. Using aFrench-language blogging service calledMonblogue, Molly, a business student,posted a few paragraphs every day.19

What makes blogs so attractive, inboth the educational community and theInternet at large, is their ease of use. Ablog owner can edit or update a new entrywithout worrying about page formats orHTML syntax. Sebastian Fiedler, a mediapedagogy specialist at the University ofAugsburg in Germany, has been monitor-ing the rise of blogs for a number of years.“Many lightweight, cost-efficient systemsand tools have emerged in the personalWebpublishing realm,” he writes. “Thesetools offer a new and powerful toolkit forthe support of collaborative and individ-ual learning that adheres to the patternsof contemporary information-intensivework and learning outside of formal edu-cational settings.”20

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A blog is characterized by its reflection of apersonal style, and this style may be reflectedin either the writing or the selection of linkspassed along to readers.

The blogging tool is, at its heart, a formwith two fields: title and entry—and thetitle field is optional. Learning MediaConsultant Jay Cross captures the con-cept with his Bloggar tool. “Blog softwarecomes with a personal Website for thosewho don’t already have one. The softwarecaptures your words in dated entries,maintaining a chronological archive ofprior entries. In the spirit of sharing in-herent to Net culture, the software andthe personal Websites are usually free.”21

What needs to be kept in mind here is thatwith respect to blogging tools, anythingother than the entry field is a bell or whis-tle. Since the essence of the blog is foundin individual, dated entries, the essenceof the blogging tool is the entry field.

Blogging software breaks down intotwo major categories: hosting servicesand installed applications.

Hosting services. A hosting service is aWeb site that will give you access to every-thing you need in order to create a blog. Itwill offer a form for you to input your en-tries, some tools that allow you to create a

template for your blog, and access tosome built-in accessories. Your blog ishosted on the hosting service (hence thename), and the URL will typically reflectthe hosting service’s URL. In a way, blog-ging hosting services are very similar tothe services that allowed people to hosttheir own Web sites (services such asGeoCities or Angelfire) or their own dis-cussions (services such as Yahoo! Groupsor ezboard).

The best-known (and one of the earli-est) hosting service is Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), founded by PyraLabs. When the company was bought byGoogle early in 2003, it reporting havingabout 1.1 million users.22 The Blogger in-terface is not much more complicatedthan Jay Cross’s Bloggar: the large field atthe top allows you to submit an entry,while instructions and some options areprovided in the lower pane (after youpost, the help disappears, and you canview and edit your previous posts).

Another major hosting service is Live-Journal (http://www.livejournal.com), a

name that speaks to the side of bloggingthat began as an online diary. Far more sothan any other service, LiveJournal at-tempts to foster a community of users, astrategy that used to be reflected in itsterms of use: “LiveJournal relies on thecommunity it creates to maintain an enjoy-able journaling environment. In order toencourage healthy community growth,new free accounts must be sponsored by apresent member of LiveJournal.” Live-Journal reports more than 3 million ac-counts, with about half that in active status.

Other major blog hosting services in-clude GrokSoup, Salon Blogs, and Type-Pad. Major international hosting servicesinclude FarsiBlogs, for Iranian writers,and BlogsCN, for Chinese contributors.

Installed Applications. A remotely in-stalled application is a piece of softwarethat you obtain from the provider and in-stall on your own Web site. These systemsare similar to Web-based applicationssuch as ColdFusion or Hypermail. Be-cause of this, the number of users ismuch lower, but those who do use them

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tend (arguably) to be more dedicated andmore knowledgeable than those who usehosting services. Installed applicationsare also more suitable for institutionaluse, since access can be controlled.

Probably the best-known remotely in-stalled application is Six Apart’s MovableType (http://www.moveabletype.org).As shown in the screenshot from theLearning Circuits blog back-end (figure 1),Movable Type offers numerous optionsfor the blog author, including extendedentries. Most school blogs use MovableType. “We used this product because it isfree for use by educational institutionssuch as schools,” says the National Re-search Council’s Todd Bingham, who withSébastien Paquet has just completed workwith Le Centre d’Apprentissage du Haut-Madawaska, an elementary school innorthern New Brunswick, providingWeblogs to all its students and teachers.“In addition to its semi–open source na-ture, Movable Type is written in Perl andcan be back-ended by a MySQL databasesystem,” Bingham adds. “Both of these

products are also open-source in nature. Thisallows us to customizesome of the features,rather than having towrite something fromthe ground up. We werealso able to set up an ad-ditional security systemusing this interface byusing Linux’s default se-curity features. A privateblog, viewable only bythe teacher and a singu-lar student, can be setup this way. This allowsthe student and teacherto have a private meansof feedback, as opposedto the public blog opento the public.”23

In mid-May 20 04,h o w e v e r, S i x Ap a r tchanged its pricing strategy for MovableType, dramatically increasing costs forsites with multiple blogs. This prompted

a storm of protest from a blogging com-munity fearful of even greater licensingchanges, as typified by Mark Pilgrim’s

Figure 1. Movable Type

remarks: “Movable Type is a dead end. Inthe long run, the utility of all non-Freesoftware approaches zero. All non-Freesoftware is a dead end.” And althoughMovable Type recanted, many bloggersmoved to an open source blogging tool,WordPress (http://wordpress.org/).24

Another major installed application,and one of the earliest available, is User-Land’s Radio (http://radio.userland.com). This is an updated version of morecomprehensive site-management toolssuch as Frontier and Manila. Instead ofrunning on a Web server, Radio runs onthe user’s desktop and displays through aWeb browser; blog entries are then up-loaded to a Web site. In addition, “Radioincludes a powerful newsreader that al-lows you to subscribe to all of the sites youlike. Radio will automatically go out ontothe Web and find new updates to sites likethe NYTimes, the BBC, and weblogs thatyou subscribe to every hour.”25

UserLand’s software was used tolaunch a high-profile blogging experi-ment, Weblogs at Harvard Law, whichwas created when UserLand’s founder,Dave Winer, became a Berkman Fellow.Arising from a conference in November2002 called “What Is Harvard’s DigitalIdentity?” it was intended, at least in part,to establish “intellectual community”among “the University’ disparate schoolsand centers.”26 Launched in February2003, it allows anyone with a harvard.edue-mail address to create a weblog, and ahundred or so staff and students havedone so, including Philip Greenspun,John Palfrey, and an anonymous bloggerknown only as “The Redhead.”

Harvard’s experience illustrates oneof the pitfalls of hosting such free-ranging media. Though the universityadministration had intended not to inter-fere with blog content—sometimes achallenge, since staff and students can beopenly critical—it was forced to step inwhen Derek Slater, a student, posted in-ternal memos from Diebold Election

Systems, an electronic voting-machinemanufacturer, on his blog. The memossuggested that the machines faced nu-merous problems, and the companythreatened legal action against Slater andHarvard University.27

Though the company retreated, thepotential for conflict between a blogwriter and an institution’s administrationremains. In addition to posting copy-righted or protected information, stu-dents can get into trouble for libelouscontent. For example, a Valley HighSchool student in Nevada was repri-manded for writing, “Kill Alaina!” (a class-mate he found irritating) and for making avulgar comment about a teacher. In an-other case, a student at St. Martin HighSchool in Mississippi was suspended forthree days after using her blog to call ateacher “perverted.”28

Despite the risks, teachers and studentsalike feel the benefits make blogging wellworthwhile, if for no other reason thanthat blogs encourage students to write. AsRosalie Brochu, a student at St-Joseph, ob-serves: “The impact of the blogs on my dayto day life is that I write a lot more and a lotlonger than the previous years. I also paymore attention when I write in my blog (es-pecially my spelling) since I know any-body can read my posts.”29

In one sense, asking why anyonewould write a weblog is like asking whyanyone would write at all. But morespecifically, the question is why anyonewould write a weblog as opposed to, say, ab o o k o r a j o u r n a l a r t ic l e . G e o rgeSiemens, an instructor at Red River Col-lege in Winnipeg and a longtime advo-cate of educational blogging, offers acomprehensive list of motivating factors.In particular, he notes, weblogs breakdown barriers. They allow ideas to bebased on merit, rather than origin, andideas that are of quality filter across theInternet, “viral-like across the blogo-sphere.” Blogs allow readers to hear theday-to-day thoughts of presidential can-

didates, software company executives,and magazine writers, who all, in turn,hear opinions of people they wouldnever otherwise hear.30

The students at Institut St-Josephlearned about the communicative powerof blogs firsthand. “In the beginning, stu-dents anticipated the audience in a re-stricted circle,” notes Principal Asselin.“According to the comments about theirwork, they realized that a lot of peoplecould react and be part of the conversa-tion. Each student received more than tencomments related to their posts. Theyhad not fully realized that the entireworld could read them.”31 Imagine theyoung students’ surprise when, sometime after posting a review of a circus ontheir blog, someone from the circus readthe review and wrote back!

But perhaps the most telling motiva-tion for blogging was offered by Mark Pil-grim in his response to and elaboration on“The Weblog Manifesto”: “Writers will writebecause they can’t not write. Repeat that overand over to yourself until you get it. Doyou know someone like that? Someonewho does what they do, not for money orglory or love or God or country, but simplybecause it’s who they are and you can’timagine them being any other way?”32

Pilgrim’s moving declaration shouldbe read as a cautionary note. The warn-ing is not about bosses who don’t wantemployees to write weblogs (thoughthat danger exists), but this: writingweblogs is not for everybody. In particular,if you feel no empathy, no twinge ofrecognition, on reading Pilgrim’swords, then writing a weblog is proba-bly not for you. This does not mean thatyou are not a part of the weblog world.It merely means that you participate ina different way.

And herein lies the dilemma foreducators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogginginteracts with the more restrictive do-mains of the educational system? What

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Blogs allow ideas to be based on merit, ratherthan origin, and ideas that are of quality filteracross the Internet, “viral-like across theblogosphere.”

happens when the necessary rules andboundaries of the system are imposedon students who are writing blogs,when grades are assigned in order to getstudents to write at all, and when postsare monitored to ensure that they don’tsay the wrong things?

After returning from a writingteachers’ conference with sessions onblogging, Richard Long, a professor atSt. Louis Community College, ex-plained the issue this way: “I’m notconvinced, however, the presenterswho claimed to be blogging are actu-ally blogging. They’re using bloggingsoftware, their students use bloggingsoftware, but I’m not convinced thatusing the software is the same as blog-ging. For example, does posting writ-ing prompts for students constituteblogging? Are students blogging whenthey use blogging software to write tothose prompts?”33

After three years of experimentationwith his Weblogg-Ed blog, Will Richard-son also expressed his doubts: “By itsvery nature, assigned blogging inschools cannot be blogging. It’s con-trived. No matter how much we want tospout off about the wonders of audi-ence and readership, students who areasked to blog are blogging for an audi-ence of one, the teacher.” When the se-mester ends, “students drop blogginglike wet cement.” Richardson wants toteach students to write with passion,but he notes: “I can’t let them do it pas-sionately due to the inherent censor-ship that a high school served Weblogcarries with it.”34

It seems clear that although bloggingcan and does have a significant andworthwhile educational impact, thisimpact does not come automatically anddoes not come without risks. As manywriters have noted, writing a weblog ap-pears in the first instance to be a form ofpublishing, but as time goes by, blog-ging resembles more and more a con-

versation. And for a conversation to besuccessful, it must be given a purposeand it must remain, for the most part,unconstrained.

One of the criticisms of blogs, and es-pecially student blogs, is that the studentswrite about nothing but trivia. Examplescan be seen all over the Internet. And howmany students, when facing the bloggingscreen, feel like “Matt,” who writes: “Noweach time I warily approach writing a blogentry, or start writing it, or actually write it,I end up thinking ‘what is the point?’—and, after all, what is?” When given theirown resources to draw on, bloggers, espe-cially young bloggers, can become frus-trated and may eventually report having“committed the ultimate blogging sin oflosing interest in myself.“35

As Richardson says, blogging as agenre of writing may have “great value interms of developing all sorts of criticalthinking skills, writing skills and infor-mation literacy among other things. Weteach exposition and research and someother types of analytical writing already,I know. Blogging, however, offers stu-dents a chance to a) reflect on what theyare writing and thinking as they writeand think it, b) carry on writing about atopic over a sustained period of time,maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readersand audience in a sustained conversa-tion that then leads to further writingand thinking.”36

Good conversations begin with listen-ing. Ken Smith, an English teacher at In-diana University, explains: “Maybe somefolks write flat, empty posts or bad diaryposts because they don’t know any othergenres (they just aren’t readers, in onesense) and because [they] aren’t respond-ing to anything (that is, they aren’t read-ing anything right now).” It’s like arrivinglate to a party: the first act must be to lis-ten, before venturing forth with an opin-ion. Smith suggests, “Instead of assigningstudents to go write, we should assignthem to go read and then link to what in-

terests them and write about why it doesand what it means.”37

The jury is still out, but as Richardsonsuggests, “It’s becoming more clear justwhat the importance of blogging mightbe.” As Smith writes, “It is through qualitylinking . . . that one first comes in contactwith the essential acts of blogging: closereading and interpretation. Blogging, atbase, is writing down what you thinkwhen you read others. If you keep at it,others will eventually write down whatthey think when they read you, and you’llenter a new realm of blogging, a newrealm of human connection.”38

But it is more than merely assigningt o p i c s t o b l o g a b o u t . A s J e r e m yHiebert, a Web designer and graduatestudent in Canada, comments, “I’veseen evidence of this in courses with re-quired e-portfolio or reflective journalelements. . . . As soon as these activitiesare put into the context of school, fo-cused on topics the students are unlikelyto care about much, they automaticallylose a level of authenticity and engage-ment. These disengaged students (non-writers and writers alike) won’t get themain benefits of true reflective learningno matter how good the instruction andtools are.”39

Despite obvious appearances, blog-ging isn’t really about writing at all; that’sjust the end point of the process, the out-come that occurs more or less naturally ifeverything else has been done right.Blogging is about, first, reading. But moreimportant, it is about reading what is ofinterest to you: your culture, your com-munity, your ideas. And it is about engag-ing with the content and with the authorsof what you have read—reflecting, criti-cizing, questioning, reacting. If a studenthas nothing to blog about, it is not be-cause he or she has nothing to write aboutor has a boring life. It is because the stu-dent has not yet stretched out to the largerworld, has not yet learned to meaning-fully engage in a community. For blogging

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Blogging is about, first, reading. But moreimportant, it is about reading what is ofinterest to you: your culture, your community,your ideas.

in education to be a success, this firstmust be embraced and encouraged.

From time to time, we read about thepotential of online learning to bringlearning into life, to engender workplacelearning or lifelong learning. When JayCross and others say that 90 percent ofour learning is informal, this is the sort ofthing they mean: that the lessons wemight expect to find in the classroomwork their way, through alternativemeans, into our day-to-day activities.

Blogging can and should reverse thisflow. The process of reading online, en-gaging a community, and reflecting it on-line is a process of bringing life into learn-ing. As Richardson comments, “This [theblogging process] just seems to me to becloser to the way we learn outside ofschool, and I don’t see those things hap-pening anywhere in traditional educa-tion.” And he asks: “Could blogging be theneedle that sews together what is now alot of learning in isolation with no realconnection among the disciplines? Imean ultimately, aren’t we trying to teachour kids how to learn, and isn’t that[what] blogging is all about?”40e

NotesMy thanks to the many educational bloggers who con-tributed to this article and without whom it could nothave been completed: Will Richardson, Jeremy Hiebert,George Siemens, Todd Bingham, Rod Savoie, Mario As-selin, Mireille Guay, Dominic Ouellet-Tremblay, Flo-rence Dassylva-Simard, Hugo De Larochellière, Jean-Philippe L. Côté, and Rosalie Brochu, and to all the rest ofmy friends in the blogosphere—you know who you are.1. Mario Asselin, “Weblogging at the Institut St-

Joseph,” Mario tout de go, September 1, 2003, <http://carnets.ixmedia.com/mario/archives/002425.html>.

2. Visit the Institut St-Joseph public spaces online at<http://cyberportfolio.ixmedia.com/carriere/> or<http://cyberportfolio.ixmedia.com/>.

3. Asselin, “Weblogging at the Institut St-Joseph.” 4. Mario Asselin, e-mail to the author, March 25, 2004. 5. See Amanda Lenhart, John Horrigan, and Deborah

Fallows, “Content Creation Online,” Pew Internet &American Life Project, February 29, 2004, <http://w w w . p e w i n t e r n e t . o r g / p d f s / P I P _ C o n t e n t _Creation_Report.pdf>; and “Content CreationOnline,” Pew Internet & American Life Projectpress release, February 29, 2004, <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/77/press_release.asp>.

6. Will Richardson, “Blogging and RSS—The ‘What’sIt?’ and ‘How To’ of Powerful New Web Tools forEducators,” Information Today, January/February2004, <http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml>.

7. Bernie Dodge, “Birth of 28 New Bloggers,” One-TrickC y b e r P o n y , January 20, 2004, <http://home.earthlink.net/~bdodge/blog/2004_01_18_archive.html#107466556022679878>, cited in the Educa-tional Bloggers Network: <http://www.ebn.weblogger.com/>.

8. This short history and the quotation come from Re-becca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective,”Rebecca’s Pocket, September 7, 2000, <http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html>.

9. Charles Cooper, “When Blogging Came of Age,”CNET News.com, September 21, 2001, <http://news.com.com/2010-1071-281560.html?legacy=cnet&tag=bt_bh>.

10. Jorn Barger, “Weblog Resources FAQ,” Robot Wis-dom, September 1999, <http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/>.

11. Simon Firth, “Baring Your Soul to the Web,” Salon,July 3, 1998, <http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/07/cov_03feature.html>.

12. Catherine Seipp, “Online Uprising,” American Jour-nalism Review, June 2002, <http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2555>.

13. Meg Hourihan, “What We’re Doing When WeBlog,” O’Reilly Web Devcenter, June 13, 2002, <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html>.

14. Henry Farrell, “The Street Finds Its Own Use forThings,” Crooked Timber, September 15, 2003,<http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000516.html>.

15. Rick Effland, “The Treasure Fleet of Zheng He,” RickEffland Blog , April 4, 2004, <http://apps.mc.maricopa.edu/blogs/asb222/reffland/archives/cat_something_to_share.html>.

16. Alexander Halavais, “Media Law” course website,February 17, 2004, <http://alex.halavais.net/courses/law/>.

17. Mireille Guay, e-mail to the author, March 26, 2004.18. Farrell, “The Street Finds Its Own Uses.”19. Lane Dunlop, comment, Crooked Timber, September

18, 2003, <http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000516.html>.

20. Sebastian Fiedler, symposium leader, “IntroducingDisruptive Technologies for Learning: PersonalWebpublishing and Weblogs,” Ed-Media Meeting,June 24, 2004, <http://static.cognitivearchitects.com/gems/Seblogging/EdMediaSymposium.pdf>.

21. Jay Cross, “Blogs,” Learning Circuits, April 2002,<http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/apr2002/ttools.htm>.

22. Dan Gillmor, “Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time,” SiliconValley.com, February 15, 2003, <http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml>.

23. Todd Bingham, e-mail to the author, April 14, 2004.See also Sébastien Paquet, “Weblogs Enter NewBrunswick School,” Seb’s Open Research, April 16,

2004, <http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2004/04/16.html#a1539>.

24. Mena Trott, “It’s About Time,” Mena’s Corner, May13, 2004, Six Apart Web site, <http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml#>; Mark Pilgrim, “Freedom 0,” Dive IntoMark, May 14, 2004, <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0>; Mena Trott, “An-nouncing Pricing and Licensing Changes to Mov-able Type,” Six Log, June 15, 2004, Six Apart Website, <http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/06/announcing_pric.shtml>.

25. “Radio UserLand v8.0.8,” PC World, July 6, 2004,<http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22898,00.asp>.

26. Beth Potier, “Berkman Center Fellow Dave WinerWants to Get Harvard Blogging,” Harvard Gazette,April 17, 2003, <http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/04.17/13-blogging.html>.

27. John Harvard’s Journal, “Creating Community, On-line and Off,” Harvard Magazine, vol. 106, no. 3(January–February 2004), <http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/010464.html>.

28. Lisa Kim Bach, “Internet Diaries: School DisciplineQuestioned,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 10,2003, <http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Nov-10-Mon-2003/news/22546246.html>;“Miss. School Suspends Student for Calling Teacher‘Perverted’ in Online Journal,” Student Press Law Cen-ter, January 29, 2004, <http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=736&year>.

29. Mario Asselin, quoting the student, e-mail to the au-thor, March 25, 2004.

30. George Siemens, “The Art of Blogging—Part 1,”elearnspace , December 1, 2002, <http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm>.

31. Mario Asselin, e-mail to the author, March 25, 2004.32. Mark Pilgrim, “Write,” Dive Into Mark, October 1,

2001 (no longer extant); “The Weblog Manifesto,”Talking Moose, September 29, 2001, <http://talkingmoose.manilasites.com/2001/09/29>.

33. Richard Long, “Back from San Antonio,” 2River,March 28, 2004, <http://www.2river.org/blog/archives/000077.html>.

34. Will Richardson, “The Blogging in Schools Ques-tion,” Weblogg-Ed, April 13, 2004, <http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/04/13#a1699>.

35. Matt, “Circle Limit II,” Walky Talky, September 25,2003, <http://walkytalky.net/archives/000062.html>.

36. Will Richardson, “Metablognition,” Weblogg-Ed,April 27, 2004, <http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/04/27>.

37. Ken Smith, “CCCC Waves and Ripples,” Weblogs inHigher Education, March 30, 2004, <http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog_comments.php?id=P2636_0_13_0>.

38. Will Richardson, “Reading and Blogging,” Weblogg-Ed, March 31, 2004, <http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/03/31>; Smith, “CCCC Waves and Ripples.”

39. Jeremy Hiebert, e-mail to the author, April 22, 2004.40. Will Richardson, e-mail to the author, April 27,

2004.

26 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � September/October 2004

The process of reading online, engaging acommunity, and reflecting it online is aprocess of bringing life into learning.