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Ignore for a moment all of the sound and fury surrounding blogs. Try to forget that Time magazine named bloggers one of the People of the Year in 2004. Tune out the media noise just long enough to think about this: After decades of willingly surrendering a growing percentage of our lives to telephones, televisions, VCRs, walkmen, video games, and DVD and mp3 players, we seem to have stumbled upon a communications technology that is, by and large, text-based. Millions of people are enthusiastically jumping onto a bandwagon that demands reading, writing, and, at its best, thoughtful analysis. Who would have imagined?

This module operates on the assumption that any technology that actively fosters the practices of literacy and critical thinking has great potential as a teaching tool. But, like a 3-year-old wielding a hammer, a blog is only effective when rightly used. By the time you finish this unit, you will be familiar with the history and workings of a blog, you will have created a blog of your own, and you will have been exposed to several proven strategies for integrating blogging into your academic life, both as a teacher and scholar.

The unit has been divided into five lessons, each of which concludes with a brief activity:

1 | History of Blogs
2 | Anatomy of a Blog
3 | How-To
4 | Active Learning
5 | Professional Development

Blogging is a technology of the moment. By the end of the decade it will have likely evolved into some new animal entirely. But that's beside the point. The real point is that blogging is all about the words, and as academics we should be interested in harnessing as much of the potential in those words as possible.

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