Dave Cockayne’s personal blog

I’ve had this blog for a few months now and I don’t really know what to do with it. I started a blog because the college I work at was considering providing blogs for students, well a senior member of staff heard about blogs been the next big thing “so why don’t we have one?”.

I didn’t know what to put on a blog at the time and was dubious about their contribution to a student’s learning. I decided to see what happened when I used a blog for no particular reason and months later the answer is not very much. A few posts about nothing in particular, not connected, related, of any educational value or of any interest to any one including myself. A few passing thoughts recorded for no great reason other than thinking ‘I really should blog something’.

I feel no great desire to publish my thoughts to the world, many blogs I’ve looked at seem to be inane drivel pouring from persons thought processes onto the web (like this is). Other blogs are for corporate projects, hobbies, political coolness, rants and neurotic outlets. A seemingly huge span of human culture centred around a person or project.

I am also a little worried about the future consequences of providing blogs to students, even if a student deletes a post there is no guarantee that it doesn’t still exist in a cache or archive, the internet archive has a 2 petabyte collection of old sites from the last ten years. People are already very aware of how easy it is to use caches to dig up deleted material as can be seen in this blog entry about why people blog:

Speaking of hot, and why not? Here’s Gillian Gunson: My simple answer: I’m a passive-aggressive attention whore.After visiting Gill’s blog “gillianic tendencies” it doesn’t seem that simple. (The researchers among us can find her earlier postings in Google cache. Thank you Google.)

What happens when students go on to apply for responsible jobs?

No point denying it when the third link on the google results page for a search of your name points to the archived version of your 10 year old uni blog post where you wrote about waking up with a hangover having slept with someone you shouldn’t have after taking too many drugs the night before. Interviewers will tend to strike you off the list for running their new particle accelerator…

A good even if extreme example of the consequences of even an anonymous blog is the girl with a one track mind A 30 something woman starts an anonymous blog in 2004 writing very explicitly and intimately about her sex life, she gets a readership of several hundred thousand and the offer of a book deal which she accepts. The same week the book is published in 2006 a national newspaper revealed her true identity to the world. She looses her job and career and has to come to terms with the fact that her family, friends and everyone she has ever slept with now know about it.

If blogs are personal and intimate does education have any place encouraging students to publish in this fashion by providing the service?

If blogs in education are provided as a less intimate learning log, personal learning journey or reflective journal surely this is best done within the confines of an institutional learning environment rather than out in the wild web?

Looking at warwick blogs there seems to be little difference between the subject of posts to blogs and the subjects you would see by collecting a persons posts to different forums. It’s just organised in a more egotistical fashion.

A pattern I have noticed in comparing blogs, forums and comments is that many blog owners put a lot more effort into the construction of their work than if they were starting a thread on forum or posting a comment. The subject (and even the quality/value sometimes) may not change greatly but the effort put into it and the quantity seems to be consistently higher. Anybody know if there is any proper research available on blog posting?

I have noticed this in the few posts that I have made on this blog I seem to put more thought and care into a blog posting than I would normally put into a forum post or even many emails.

Instead of letting it die I’ll see if defining a set purpose for blogging will motivate me to post more.

I’ve decided to use this blog to form passing abstract thoughts into something more coherent and lasting and reassess my use of it in a few months time. The only audience I’m targeting is myself, I could of course simply use a diary but that wouldn’t be blogging would it? A fairly vague raison d-etre but good enough for now

Filed by dave at 2:20 pm under Uncategorized
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