Teacher’s guide to blogging
The Guardian put up A teacher’s guide to blogging in January. It’s very brief, nicely done. The article is part of the larger Special Report: Weblogs from the renowned British newspaper, which has a fine Newsblog of its own.
I required journalism students to keep individual blogs last fall. I liked the results and will probably do it again the next time I teach the course.
Larry Pryor, who teaches in USC’s journalism program, wrote (PDF file) that he “began using a Weblog as a teaching tool in 1999.”
I won’t kid you — most of my students didn’t like it. By the end of the semester, they got really tired of writing two posts a week — even though they had chosen their own topics. But I thought, hey, if you don’t want to write two short news items a week, maybe you’re not cut out to be a journalist.
Technorati tags: blogs | teaching | journalism
Postscript: In an article dated Friday, March 3, 2006, William Powers wrote (in the National Journal, which will move this story behind a subscription wall so fast, there is no point in linking it) that blogs are “overhyped and underperforming.” I can’t disagree with that, generally speaking.
Powers continued: “In a new Gallup Poll, only 9 percent of U.S. Internet users said they frequently read blogs. Worse, blogs are flatlining. ‘It seems the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative last year,’ Gallup said.”
Technorati says something like 70,000 new blogs are created every day. Well, naturally most of them will have an audience of one.
But do not miss the point that some blogs have significant readership. It’s not that all blogs are bad and poorly attended (so to speak).
March 3, 2006 at 5:49 pmWhat Powers did not mention was another Gallup finding: “[O]ne in five Web users read Web-logs, or ‘blogs,’ either frequently or occasionally.”
March 3, 2006 at 5:54 pm