Week 2 Discussion

My second week's article is entitled "The Blogging Phenomenon:Who? How? Why?" and I found the article on digital divide .net. The article starts out talking about how the word blog was voted word of year in 2004 and ABC news declared bloggers People of the Year. Blogs can be focused on one specific idea written by one author who can incorporate different ideas or by many writers focused on one or many topics. Blogs are made up of many different types of media, including writing, images, video clips and pictures. The pictures can be taken with digital camera and now with mobile phones.
Blogs have been around since the mid-90s but in the past couple years blogs have been especially embraced. In the past couple elections, both political conventions were covered by bloggers. In the U.S alone there are more than 8 million blogs and now 6 million Americans now a large portion of their news and information through blogs. When blogs started out the average blogger was a white male but in recent times surveyors have found that women and minorities are starting to blog more and more. One feature that makes blogging different than other forms of information media is the ability for readers to provide feedback by posting a comment.
I think the technology of blogging relates to teaching and learning because I believe it is a good way for students that might be too shy to participate in class to come back and post a blog about his/her comments from the class and the teacher and students can come and comment to the blog. Also, for an online class since there is no face to face meetings this is a perfect way to communicate with students and the teacher.
I think blogging would be a positive experience for teachers to use it more with class discussions and assignments. I think further research is necessary because teachers that aren't using should consider using it in their classrooms.