Blog Blog Blog

There is a lot of blogging out there these days! It seems that everyone has one, and they are updating it frequent. If you are not blogging, you are probably reading other people's blogs. I can agree on this, as I have read blogs for years now, but honestly, I have never blogged myself. I always thought it was reserved for those who could not keep their thoughts confined to their own head. I was never one to go out of my way to search, locate or track down somebody's blog for their ideas on this or that. I was more of one to end up on a blog because a web search brought me there.

Bloggers always reminded me of people I'd see reporting on TMZ the television station. In my mind, blogging was reserved for those who had the time to sit and write in their internet diary about their thoughts in hopes that someone would read it, share it, and somehow become famous. This outlandish thought was fueled by the stereotypical thought that blogging was a bunch of whining from people who had nothing better to do with a computer.

Times have changed. I now see the importance for blogging. As a growing scholar in the discipline of education, I find myself reading as many literacies as I can to learn about the great world of education. This thoughtful paradigm shift within myself has quaked free an abundance of resources that I find myself desperately trying to read as fast as I can.

As I looked for blogs to read, I found myself looking for blogs that contained information about things I like myself. For example, I began searching for blogs that contained information about video games, ice hockey, and auto mechanics. These blogs were great because not only were they all very different, but they all contained a wide variety of multimedia within them. I noticed that each type of blog I looked at contained information in ways that might suite that audience more properly than another. For example, I noticed the auto mechanics blogs I read often contained many step-by-step instructions pertaining to do-it-yourself fixes to cars and upgrades. The ice hockey blogs often contained videos from a variety of places. The video game blogs often contained actual games to play!

Lets be honest though, not everything found out there is worth reading, or remembering for that matter. It takes a great deal of practice to understand how digital literacies like blogging works. So, my first task is to explore what is out there. A great place to do this is within my graduate course on reading and writing across content fields. Here I'll be able to practice my skills in order to become a competent blogger,  so here we go!