more resources

One other way to think about how to use blogs in academics is to look at the blogs of some academics who blog. The collection I offer here is by no means complete, but it should give you some sense of how real blogs are being used by real academics:

• Professors Who Blog: A short list of academics who blog and a good starting place for finding, as the title would suggest, professors who blog. The list, though short, is in good working order and links to academics in a variety of disciplines, from economics to political science to history. All linked blogs appear to be quite active.

• Research Blogs: While "professors who blog" tends to list those who blog about personal and professional events in their lives, this listing contains academics who blog as part of their research practice. These blogs include research notes as well as reflections on the research process and covers a wide range of academic fields.

• Digital Medievalist: "Useful tools, sites, references, and opinionated commentary about technology, with particular attention to Instructional Technology and the humanities, from the perspective of a Digital Medievalist." This is a well-written and well-designed blog by Lisa Spangenberg which combines her interests in medieval literature and instructional technology. Blog entries tend to focus on technology, but also include blogs about her interests in medieval and celtic studies. She also maintains a separate blog that focuses more directly on medieval and celtic studies.

• Brooklyn Blogged: A blog that's "thinking about technology and education." It includes links on the right hand side to other blogs as well as to weblogs in education. Entries are frequent and often focus on the use of blogs in education.

• Chris' Teaching Journal Blog: The teaching journal of Chris Berry—apparently no longer updated or maintained. Still, it provides some interesting self-reflection on teaching and classroom practice.

• Dr. B's Blog: "A blog of classroom activities and discussions. A place where rhetoric rocks!!" The blog of Samantha Blackmon at Purdue. Includes links to a writing blog, a workshop blog, and the blogs of past classes.

• English Composition: The blog for Cullen Wells' class in technology and 21st century literacy. Apparently no longer updated.

• Rhetoric and Composition: Deborah Gussman's blog for a class in rhetoric and composition at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. Although no longer updated, it does include a link to her personal blog, which is. She also has a weblog for her Spring 2003 class: We Take Meth(odologies)

• Teaching Blog: A collection of Computer and Compositions "wikis." Wikis resemble blogs in that they allow someone to add content to a page through a web interface; however, they are a much more robust and much more general tool, in that the software is allows the creation, linking, and editing of multiple pages. In this sense, a wiki is a tool for making websites that can be adapted to blogging. For one such adaptation, see Wiki Weblog.

• Teaching Blog: Kevin Brooks' blog. Though "intended to support [his] English 110 course, Fall 2002," it appears to be a current blog with recent entires.

• The Comp Blog: "A team blog about teaching, blogging, and teaching about blogging with blogging." Demonstrates the collaborative possibilites enabled by having a blog with multiple authors.

• Carvingcode: Randy Brown's blog features a good mix of tech news and "edutopical" entries.

Blogs have spawned a number of articles, forums, and conference. Here's a sampling:

• Weblogg-ed: Not only is this site a rich blog, but it also has extensive links to other education bloggers, weblog resources, and best practices.

• EdBlogger Forum: A forum-based discussion area and resource for educational bloggers. It also has a forum for the EdBlogger 2003 conference to be held during NCTE's conference in November 2003.

• Blogtalk: Homepage for a weblog conference being held in Vienna. Its stated mission is to " survey the status quo of Weblogs or Blogs as tools for professional and private use."

• Teaching and Technology: "A weblog for participants in the Conference on Teaching and Technology, held under the auspices of the Wabash Center." Apparently no longer updated, however the blog entries include a number of links connected to teaching and technology.

• Blogging: An article from LEARN NC, the North Carolina Teacher's Network that suggests the multiple ways in which blogs can be used in education. The piece is a good basic introduction to some of the uses of blogs in education.

• Elearn Space Blog: A general blog for "elearning resources and news." Blog entries cover a wide variety of topics, from Linux to heuristics for evaluating online communities, creating a particularly broad resource for anyone interested in instructional technology.

• Teaching with a Weblog: Please note that this is a Microsoft Word document. Timothy Johnston's paper submitted to the Academy of Educational Leadership Journal. The paper provides an overview to the benefits of using a blog in teaching .

• "Blogs: A Disruptive Technology Coming of Age?": An article from Syllabus by Phillip Long that introduces the concept of blogs and basic information on classroom uses and blog creation.

• School Blogs: A free blog service created expressly with educators in mind. The blogs are hosted by School Blogs.

Sometimes, a printed text is the best way to learn a new technology, since it allows you to refer to the page while looking at the screen. A number of books about blogging have been published recently:

• The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaing Your Blog, by Rebecca Blood

• We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, by Paul Bausch

• Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs, by Todd Stauffer

The design for this site emerged from the idea of 2003 being the "Year of the Blog," an idea that first occured to me during the discussion period after my panel at the 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication. The opening graphic picks up on the idea of the web having a zodiac along the line of the Chinese system. The eleven Chinese characters represent the various signs of the Chinese zodiac, while the "chop" displays two such signs—the Dragon and the Goat or Sheep—as well as the logo from Blogger.

Working from this initial graphic concept, I wanted to develop graphics that both incorporated Blogger's logo and various modes of writing, hence the blueprint, the pad of paper, the books, and the computer screen. My goal was to suggest a kind of continuity between these technologies of writing and blogging.

All of the graphics were custom-crafted in Photoshop. Click on the following thumbnails for full-size versions of these graphics:

If anyone is interested in learning about the techniques I used to create these graphics, I would be happy to share what I have learned with them. I can be contacted at barriosb@rci.rutgers.edu.

In terms of the layout, I first saw the semi-transparent text table over a large graphic while surfing through random blogs. I found the effect striking at the time, and wanted to recreate it here. Though that blog achieved the effect through the use of layers (which is problematic on many browsers), I was able to achieve the same effect through Photoshop and a creative use of tables. If you're interested in learning how I achieved this effect, please contact me.

Finally, this site was design in Dreamweaver 4, optimized for Internet Explorer 6 at 1024x768 screen resolution. It's been tested at 800x600 and with Netscape Navigator 4.X, Mozilla 1.X, and Netscape Navigator 7 on Windows 2000, as well as Internet Explorer 5.1 and Netscape 7 on Macintosh OS 9.2.