12.22.06
Posted in Tools & Resources, Topical at 9:23 am by jon yang
Blogs aren’t just used by (aspiring) writers, successful businesses, and your grandma, they are also being used in a variety of ways as educational resources. How many ways are they being used as educational resources? Good question, you in the back.
The answer to that qustion is “infinite” or “infinite plus one” if you want to get cheeky.
For a sampling of all those brilliant educational blogs, here’s a list of “The Top 100 Education Blogs”. The list focuses the highlight on blogs that are being used in a variety of ways; from sites focused toward the community of teachers, to blogs that ponder the impact and vision of education policies.
I wish they had blogs back when I attended college (not that long ago in my mind but a long time ago as measured by years). I’d throw up a collection of personal journal type blogs from each university. It’ll be like the Real World but told through unaffiliated individuals on each campus. We could even give it a go and try to stereotype them at first, to see how they get along. A blog like this would allow us to see a person progress from freshman to senior year — or more likely, super senior year.
You could have all these first person perspectives of what it’s like to attend a certain university and potential attendees of that particular school could take a look and gain some insight on what the experience might be like. I’ve seen a whole series of books that are thematically similar to this idea. A sort of Cliff Notes or Lonely Planet for colleges; my blog versions would be uncut, unabridged, and unedited. From the mouth of babes as it were.
Students already on campus might gain a bit from these journals as well. I’d weed out all the Xanga-licious “This is my life, omg, I just had a revelation, I want to be a psychology major!” type blogs, but aim for well composed sites that actually try to articulate the college experience as a whole, not just the (melo)drama each college student endures.
Yes, that’s what I’d do to change the world. Create a network of blogs for universities. “I have a dream…”
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11.29.06
Posted in Articles, Topical at 2:56 pm by jon yang
This is going to sound obvious but at the base of it, blogging is writing, and writing often begets better writing. So what happens when you get kids to blog a lot? They improve their writing skills, their vocabulary skills, and their organizational skills. What about improving their nunchuk, bowhunting, and computer hacking skills you ask? Well, that’s a separate thing… One handful of skills at a time!
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11.12.06
Posted in Articles, Topical at 3:41 pm by jon yang
“Corporate blogging, though in its infacy, has got a shot in the arm… It is estimated that forty Fortune 500 companies publish corporate blogs, allowing CEOs, employees to bypass the public relations department, journalists and industry analysts and speak directly to the public. Amazon, Cisco and Oracle were early adopters with AMD, Dell, Kodak, GE, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo and Xerox following suit.”
-Business Standard-
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10.03.06
Posted in Articles, Topical at 11:06 pm by jon yang
Individuals are blogging from their work space, and if they do it “right,” they won’t even get fired!
“As recently as last year, when a few employees were fired elsewhere for blogging about work, Mr. Jackson’s approach would have been exceptional and cause for concern. Today, however, business blogs are becoming as common as iPods, and by some estimates are growing at a steady rate.
Rather than fight this trend and quietly hope that employees don’t reveal trade secrets, many companies are welcoming business blogs. They are betting that the medium can actually enhance a company’s reputation by providing an opportunity to build informal relationships with customers.”
-Blogging the Hand that Feeds You-
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09.30.06
Posted in Articles, Book Related, Topical at 3:11 pm by jon yang
Saturday, September 30, 2006. Story appeared in BUSINESS section, Page D2
“Nationally, though, blogs are increasingly being tapped by businesses seeking to build their brands with customers and clients by going beyond mere Web sites.
They’re still only a blip on the blogging scene, however. Of the estimated 25 million to 35 million blogs in the United States, only 5 percent are business-related, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Among the few notable business executives who are blogging are Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. There’s also a number of business blogging consultants who preach the benefits of blogs as marketing tools.
But for the most part, it’s not mainstream, at least yet. ‘Business and blogging don’t naturally mix,’ said Jonathan Yang, a Bay Area blogger who wrote ‘The Rough Guide To Blogging.’ ‘It’s not really working yet, but businesses are trying to figure out how to make it work.’
…
Another reason some business blogs don’t catch on is they try too hard to hawk their products.
‘Concentrate on explaining what it is that you do,’ said Yang. ‘If what you are doing is interesting, and if people can find you, a (blogging) community will build around it.’”
-Mehul Srivastava, Going to the Blogs-
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08.12.06
Posted in Articles, Topical at 12:48 pm by jon yang
Sunny Hundal, of the Guardian Unlimited, pens an article entitled “Why do newspapers hate us?”
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06.22.06
Posted in Articles, Topical at 10:42 pm by jon yang
The book has a whole section on how blogs are being used by educators at all levels to enhance their in (and out of) classroom experience. Blogs are being used as collaborative class projects and tools. Colleges professors use their blogs to organize classroom info. Blogs are utilized by students from the kindergarten to collegiate level.
Here’s an article posted today about blogs in education. Give it a read.
“Educators have been slower to adopt Weblogs for a variety of reasons, among them access, privacy, and security issues. But as more and more people get on the blog bandwagon, more and more teachers and schools are starting to experiment with the technology as a way to communicate with students and parents, archive and publish student work, learn with far-flung collaborators, and ‘manage’ the knowledge that members of the school community create. In fact, many are seeing Weblogs as a cheaper alternative to course management systems.”
-The “What’s It?” and “How To” of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators-
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