Weblogs, also known as blogs, are one of the most common forms of self-expression today. Anyone and everyone can sign up for free accounts with providers such as Blogger or WordPress and start publishing. People blog for different reasons: for some members of the UBC community, blogging is a way to enhance student learning. During last February’s Webloggers Salon held at Telestudios, three prolific UBC bloggers came to discuss how and why they use blogs within the university context.
Jon Beasley-Murray, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts, teaches Latin American Studies and incorporates blogs into his class curriculum. In his Latin American Literature class, he asks students to start a blog and write about the books they are studying. Jon said that some students are more motivated to blog because their work is instantly published. Once an entry is posted, it is open to the public. “It gives them an incentive because their writing counts,” says Jon. Similarly, students must also comment on posts written by their fellow classmates. As a result, a variety of conversations and discussions arise. In one instance, the author of one of the assigned books even responded to a student’s blog.
Eugene Barsky, a Physiotherapy Outreach Librarian, also witnesses this sense of interaction between people regularly. He runs the UBC Physio-Info Blog, which was first designed to inform and connect physiotherapists across British Columbia. With an initial target audience of 1,700, the site has had more than 17,000 visits over the past year. He uploads videos, podcasts, and all sorts of resources. According to Eugene, the blog helped a cohesive community whose members would’ve been difficult to reach physically. Physiotherapists from the Interior regularly visit his site to ask him for advice or information about certain issues related to their work. He even included some new devices such as an instant messaging system from Meebo and a Google custom search.
Aside from putting up new information, blogs can also be a place to aggregate already available information. This is something that E. Wayne Ross is very familiar with. He runs three blogs, each aimed at different audiences. He has a personal blog, which is ironically called Where the Blog has No Name. He also maintains a supplementary blog to the Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour called workplace blog. He collects news articles that are relevant to the Journal’s readership. He says that it is for people not comfortable with setting up their own RSS aggregator. RSS aggregators are sites that inform a subscriber if a website has been updated or not. As an instructor in the Faculty of Education, he has a course blog named e learning with e wayne where he posts announcements, uploads documents, and other relevant resources for his students. Wayne said that blogs could be both a repository and distributor of information. His course blog can also be considered a journal of his work files.
Although all three panelists see the advantages of maintaining a blog, they also understand why people don’t use them. One reason is that blogs are open to the public. The author’s work is exposed to criticism. Jon says that this leads to some student resistance because many view their university work as something private, between student and instructor. Jon also uploads drafts from some of his papers. The incomplete nature of drafts, he says, leaves his work vulnerable to more criticism. For Wayne, blogs can also become spam magnets. In many cases visitors can flood entries with their comments. It can be time consuming to sort through all of them. He also says that sometimes it can be difficult find time to write entries into his blog regularly. Some people see it as a commitment to their readership that applies pressure to the author.
We have seen the proliferation of blogs over the past few years. Their ease of use has enabled people to express themselves to the world. On that same note, we have seen that they can also be applied to enhance student and life-long learning. It can either foster a lively discussion about issues addressed in Latin American literature or connect physiotherapists across geographic distances. Blogs are flexible enough to create a dynamic new way of delivering knowledge, information, and education.