Reflections - Activity 9.1. - Desktop research

Sources

Edublogs (n.d.) ‘Edublogs - teacher and student blogs’, [online] Available from: http://edublogs.org/ (Accessed 4 January 2009).

Online Education Database (2006) ‘Top 100 Education Blogs | OEDb’, [online] Available from: http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs (Accessed 4 January 2009).

Technorati (n.d.) ‘education: Blogs, Photos, Videos and more on Technorati’, [online] Available from: http://technorati.com/blogs/tag/education (Accessed 4 January 2009).

This has been no small task.

I have spent over 7 hours reviewing blogs in education - never thought I could do it but I did. Over that time, one thing has become blatantly apparent - blogs are being used for any subject, topic, issue imaginable thus any attempt to categorize them at all seems an exercise in futility. The fact that technocrati tagged over 35,000 blogs about education, and edublogs ,which specializes in providing blogs for educators, notes how they now support over 260,000 blogs means that even if I limit my review to the results of their screening, my attempts again seem futile. The OEDb vainly attempts to pare these down to a top 100 using 10 categories - not at all evenly divided I might add nor is there any hint about how they themselves have gone about selecting such sites.

Note too the difficulty in defining the term - "range of blog use in education". Education can be formal or informal. Education in the broadest sense, can take place almost anyplace and anytime. Even if we pare this down to formal education, we still are dealing with every topic and subtopic found in education being potentially dealt with in a blog. However, in an attempt to not write off the exercise entirely, I did begin to reflect on how I may have spent more time reviewing certain blogs then others. How I may have begun to see patterns emerge in reviewing and comparing various blogs - their content, their writing style, and their appearance. Thus my attempts to categorize blogs are predictably going to display a bias towards those I gravitated towards. Blogs are defined here as journals written usually (but as I have come to learn not always) by one author. I tended to focus on blogs about "blogs" and how they could be used in education.