Reading: vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Still having the pen license I worked so hard to receive in year four and always reading books in print I can’t say I’m an embracer of new technology. For one so much of education is built up around being able to physically write and now it seems I don’t even need that pen license anymore. As Adrian puts it we have received several years of ‘intense, specialised and very high quality’ training in print literacy, and for me it would seem a waste not to use it. However, it is interesting to note the idea that successful blogging is to use print-literacy as a basis to create what is closer to what can be thought of as a ‘post-literacy’.

In teaching the usefulness of blogs are many: documentation of practice, to encourage and support reflective and process based learning, allow peer support and learning, to provide a record of achievement, assisting idea creation, supporting collaboration and developing of multi-literacies as ‘creators, rather than being limited to being passive consumers.’ The last point is quite an interesting idea, because much of education is built up around students being consumers of information without getting a chance to put their knowledge into action.

Adrian notes that a  blog is like a journal, allowing a record to be maintained of ideas, reflections, activities things to be done, and so on. However, the key differences of this to a journal or diary is that a blog is a public document and it can be linked to by others. It is written with the assumption that it has readers (that’s you). The number of readers doesn’t matter, but what you write about needs to be written about in such a way that it makes sense for other readers, differenting to the personal diary or even journal. There is an idea of publicness and therefore care needs to be exercised with the knowledge that a post will be read by others. Being public allows a blog to be linked to by others and it is this shift of semi-private to public that allows you recognise that your work is able to ‘make a contribution to a larger community’.