Oh wait...I do have experience with blogging!

I a recent conversation in the discussion area of our online class, we were asked to share any prior experience we had with blogging.  My initial thought of blogs was they had to be created through a site such as this, blogger.com, or another hosting service that catered specifically to "blogs".

However, after I thought further about Will Richardson's (2010) definition of a blog:

"Blogs, as they are known, are easily created, easily updatable Web sites that allow an author (or authors) to publish instantly to the Internet from any Internet connection." (p.10)
 

Having a couple of days since my initial post in our class conversation, I've realized I do in fact have experience with blogging if we follow Richardson's definition.  I have created websites in Dreamweaver and uploaded them to the Internet.  The Web sites are easily updatable as I have the power from my own computer to update them.  Take, for example, a classroom website created last semester.  Richardson would refer to this as a "class portal" (p. 21).

Another example of my experience with blogging is the online grading software, Edline, my school system purchased so students and parents could access grades at home.  While this was advertised to students and parents mostly as a way to monitor grades, teachers could also upload files and post announcements.  Edline was also an easily created and updateable web site from which I could publish instantly.

What is different about this blog is that interaction is encouraged.  In my first two experiences, comments did not exist.  There is space for comments on the classroom web page, however because I am on leave and without a classroom at the moment, I have not had the opportunity to explore this feature.  This blog has the ability to, "engage readers with ideas and questions and links" (Richardson, p. 18), and is not, "built on static chunks of content" (p. 17) as in my previous two experiences.  Because interaction is encouraged, this blogging experience will be much richer than previous experiences.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Corwin: Thousand Oaks, CA.