Is EDU Blogging Dead? Yes and No.
Recently, Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant fame, asked on Facebook whether or not blogging in the edusphere was dead.
The answers from his followers ranged from yes to no to maybe, to everything in-between. And while it certainly is not what it once was, there are those that still practice blogging, or long form writing. None, I feel are as powerful or as popular as they once were.
There was some value to blogging. Long form writing forced the blogger to think deeply about the subject and often a reader could gather at least once meaningful insight from the read. RSS feeds allowed readers to get an email every time their fav blog was updated, and often, a popular blogger became a minor celebrity, at least in the edtech world.
I can remember the heyday of edublogging, when the likes of McCleod, Miguel Guhlin, Ewan McIntosh, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, David Warlick Steve Hargadon Ian Jukes, Chris Lehmann, and a few others were so popular in the edtech world that they could hold their own royal courts in large conferences like ISTE and TCEA by holding “EduBloggerCon” and “ISTE Unplugged” where acolytes of these bloggers (including your’s truly) would hang out some in odd out-of the-way corner of the convention center in the hopes of learning what the heck made these people so popular with the education ed tech community, completely ignoring the rest of the convention. They even, like royalty, could hold court the day before the conference “officially started” with some free mini-conference. (The secret it turned out, was staying power. Write a lot, and write for a long time and you would eventually become a popular edtech blogger. It happened to me. (Children, I once was a somebody in the edtech world, mainly because of my blog.) Of course some of this folks turned their blog entries into books and were able to book themselves into various conferences around the country and world. Then, they would use their speaking engagements as 45 minute advertisements for their blogs, which made them more popular. It was a wild time back them.
Blogs were, at the time, great ways to build a professional learning community. I met many a person and was invited into many place Is not otherwise would have been invited into because of my blog. I remember sharing a dinner with Ewan McIntosh because he said he read my blog, even though I had no idea at the time who he was. Many bloggers would post little maps on their blog site that showed how many hits from many countries they were getting, I recall being terribly jealous of some of these bloggers whose maps were just covered with red dot “hits” and the count of how many times their site had been accessed. I then realized that many of these “hits” were from foreign hackers and bots that were probing the sites for security vulnerabilities and scrapping emails. So really, that guy did not have 37,000 hits from Asia, and Russia like he said he did on his blog...but heck who was counting? It looked impressive! It’s wasn't the size of your blog, it’s how many hits you could show off!
Of course these events (pictured above like the ISTE Edubloggercon in 2007), like the bloggers themselves, mostly faded into obscurity, retired, moved on to other jobs that didn’t allow them the time to write, or were replaced it seems with podcasts, and short form videos like TikTok. (It was ironic that podcasts emerged about the same time as blogs, were popular for a moment, went away and then came roaring back just a few years ago just as the blogs that displaced them started to lose their luster.) In fact, many of the blogs above talked about how video was going to replace writing and that we should be teaching video skills AND writing skills. Alas, I bet they didn’t think video would replace THEM, but it did.
Education blogs, I think are a dying form of communication, but blogs in general themselves are not, Many companies still have a company-related blog, but those are mostly for advertising.Blogs are often used as instructional methods especially about product updates and how to use specific features of this or that. Blogs, as a learning tool are, in my opinion, still valid ways to get students to think deeply about subjects. Many of the names mentioned above actually wrote books about classroom blogging and the positive effects that it has on students. All points that are still valid today.
Is Edublogging dead? No, but it is on life support. Maybe a few of you could help bring it back.
