Notes on The Multi-Talented Blog (social media)

So, I've had to change this unit in light of what has been going on in the online world. For years, the blog was social media, but that is no longer the case. Read below my comments on the blog (still an important part of the web and social media). Read here, my comments on newer social media.

The Blog
This was my most difficult unit of the course for which to write up notes when I started this course. We are doing this unit on the blog so early in the course because you will be using your own blog in the course. Normally, I would like to do it later when we start studying some different digital tools, but because we will actually be using blogs to communicate with one another, I had to introduce it early in the course. (I'd much prefer to cover blogs in unit 5 or 6.)

The blog was one of the first widely-available web 2.0 tools. I'll talk later in the course about the generational breakdown of web materials, but let's just say now that web 2.0 conveyed an element of interactivity that was missing from web 1.0 materials. In other words, in web 2.0 a user could somehow interact with web materials and other users. In the case of a blog, that usually meant commenting upon an author's posts or materials. In theory, that's pretty simple. I post information about World War II, and users comment on that material. In reality, there are some problems with open comments, so usually an author of a blog resorts to some sort of filtering or moderating system. Otherwise, you just get spam and garbage. And these days, it is increasingly spam and garbage that you will see as comments on open blogs.

On one hand, a blog is one of the oldest social media tools, yet on the other hand a blog can be a great web 1.0 tool to make information available, and, of course, it can do both of those at the same time. For faculty, a blog can be a great way to organize a class, provide a syllabus, explain assignments and still achieve some measure of student interactivity. It has been hard to get faculty at the college to put course and content materials online, and I have constantly encouraged faculty to consider using blogs because it is pretty easy. We've even tried to show at professional development activities how simple it really is to use a blog. Using either Blogger/Blogspot or WordPress with their numerous templates is just so easy, and there are so many different things that you can do in the way of design to make a blog now look actually pretty good.

There is a great list of blogs on the schedule for you to look at in this unit, and the blogs exhibit a wide range of behaviors. Some have a lot more interactivity than others--my two blogs on Russian history and Teaching have very little interactivity since I really don't use them that way. I guess that I should say here that you can also create a simple web page that has a comment feature (most news stories on the web routinely do this now), but that is not a blog, which is usually focused on the reflective mutterings of a single person. Anyway, back to the blogs on this week's schedule. Some of them are far more oriented to merely publishing historical material. Some have a pretty simple design, while others have actually a quite complex underpinning. (I think of the DC architecture blog.)

Finally, it is with the appearance of the blog, that you have the first digital "tool" or app. The remainder of the course really focuses on more of those tools.

Here are some blogs recommended by students:

• O Say Can You See? Stories from the National Museum of American History
• Maryland History by the Object
• Retropolis (published by the Washington Post