Blogging What, Why and How? Ask the Experts Online 17th July, 2007 Edwyn Williams

Old Web New Web 2.0 Britannica Online Yahoo! Directories Personal Websites Wikipedia Tags and Hyperlinks Blogs Top Down Bottom Up The internet, as we know it, was born in about 1983. In around 1993 the public first had access to the ‘internet’ and the word entered the lexicon in 1996. At that time websites existed for corporate entities and a few geek users who had a homepage of their own. 2000 saw the dot-com bubble burst and suddenyly the web began to change from being ‘top-down’ to being ‘bottom-up’. In 2005 around 1 billion users had access to the internet and O’Reilly coined the term ‘Web 2.0’ to demonstrate the newer, advanced internet. Applications like Flickr, del.icio.us, iTunes, Google Earth, Blogger, Wordpress and many many many more have popped up. They represent a new type of internet based of the technological lifestyle and using the internet as a tool for living instead of a replication of life in virtual world i.e. where we used to have personal websites we now have blogs and where used to have Yahoo!#s directory structure we now have Google and Technorati.

So What’s A Blog? But Blogging is more than this… Wikipedia says: A blog is a website in which journal entries are posted on a regular basis A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs Maintaining a blog is called blogging A person who posts entries is called a blogger A Blog is a web application which allows users to post information (or articles) to the internet and allow people to comment on it. They can be password protected or not and they be edited by a single user or by many. You can upload files to blogs as well as posting text, such as photos, audio and video. Blog can adhere to a standard known as RSS which allows people to keep up to date with blog headlines as and when they are added to the blog. But Blogging is more than this…

Click on the link for an example of Types of Blogs… Click on the link for an example of Online Diaries Official Journals Group Fun Collaborative Work Public Forums Photo Sharing The News Blogger: a web application that allows the easy creation, maintenance and editing of a blog that looks simple and stylish and is easy to read and write. Live Journal: for the more advanced blogger, ‘LJ’ lets you create a far more personal blog with greater customization. In most respects it is the same as Blogger. Yahoo!: The wise-man of the internet village offers a plethora of web goodies. Notably, Yahoo! 360 and My Yahoo! Which allow users to create blogs and read them as well. BBC News Online: Not only one of the most visited websites on the internet, BBC Online also allows you to access several RSS news feeds as well as pioneering podcasting of its audio content. Podcasts: The icon used comes from iTunes but podcasting is a standalone concept. The automatic download of distributed audio files via RSS is podcasting in a nutshell. It is, in many ways, radio that you download as and when it is created by subscribing to its RSS feed. You can then listen to it on your MP3 player (like the iPod, from which the term podcast is derived.). Flickr: This online photo tool allows you to backup and share your digital photo collection with, family, friends or just everybody. Via RSS people can see your photos as and when you add them. You can add photos to your Flickr account by email, direct upload or via your mobile phone. It is essentially a photo blog.

TEACHER STUDENTS CLASSROOM CLASS BLOG SCHOOL BLOG PARENTS PUBLIC Easy Distribution of Information Homework/Assignments Lecture Notes/Lectures (iTunes U) Community News Points of Interest Collaborative Work Online calendars Group blogs PARENTS PUBLIC

TEACHER STUDENTS STUDENTS’ BLOG TEACHER’S BLOG CLASS BLOG Easy Distribution of Information Homework/Assignments Lecture Notes/Lectures (iTunes U) Community News Points of Interest Collaborative Work Online calendars Group blogs PARENTS PUBLIC

Educating the Blogosphere Dysg http://thedysgblog.blogspot.com/ Teaching Hacks http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Weblogs_in_Education The Dysg blog is an example of how we use a blog to create our weekly e-newsletter, which is sent to over 3,000 recipients every Monday. The teaching hacks wiki link is very good for information about blogging