Blog, short for ‘weblog’ is basically a user generated journal style web based document. ‘Bloggers’ can (and do) create blogs on almost any conceivable content. The ‘blogosphere’ or the collective network of bloggers is huge and becoming increasing influential. For instance already the US 2008 Presidential Campaign is hiring bloggers.
The culture of blogging has been dismissed as a fad. But is this the case? The big question that we as teachers need to ask though is there a place for blogs in the modern classroom?

Chances are many of the students you teach are already blogging. For example, one social networking site MySpace is fast becoming one of the most highly accessed pages by school aged people on the planet. It would be tempting I suppose to dismiss this as simply stuff kids do out of class in their own time. However I’d argue that sites such as MySpace and the people and views they encounter there have a far greater influence on young people than schools and teachers. Furthermore, the greater the gap widens between ’school’ and the real world (which is becomingly increasingly digital) then the more disengaged students are likely to become. So it often comes down to that same old argument; kids probably already know a great deal about blogs and other social computing tools so we don’t need to teach it to them. Or another one; these things aren’t educational so there’s no place for this stuff in schools”. To me, it appears the hidden subtext is; we don’t want to learn this stuff so it’s easier for us simply to dismiss it.