Week 9 Chapter 5 New Literacies, Reflection

Who knew that blogging originated back in the 1990’s, and that it began from website managers pasting links to other websites? It makes sense that the links were finds that resonated with the person or people running the website: perhaps hilarity, or curiosity or a general newsworthy piece thought worthy of sharing. Those looking could decide where to go. Early blogging, unlike today, required more knowledge of the computer world.

Fast-forward a few years, and you have people like me who can go to a website, sign up for a blog account and be up and running fairly quickly. It is a marvelous wonder to me. By 2007, Technorati.com, a blog service noted that there were 112 million blogs, roughly 2% of the world’s population.

Blogging has been driven by those who blog and their interests which in turn has generated more technology such as networking applications. More and more blogging has migrated to other devices, which in turn has modified blogging, in many cases, to be shorter posts. It seems as new bloggers come on the scene, more technologies are born; they are moving each other along, just as when the phenomenon began some thirty years ago.

I find it fascinating what “people” like or enjoy researching, like those who study the nature of bloggers and the blog sites themselves. There is more information about the text quality of blogs and exactly who is creating the blogs and for what purposes. Interesting thought is that a blog is both a medium and a product of the practice. (p. 144) The medium is the extension of whoever is blogging, a breadth and depth of that particular person.

I think an interesting phenomena about blogging as mentioned is all of the choices you can make regarding you blog. Not just appearances, but you have the choice to accept others’ comments or disallow them, link yourself to the world, remain mostly private or tweet out, and there is also the “I like what you said or did there” thumbs up which gives some people a sense of accomplishment, just like following how many people are visiting your site. I wonder how many bloggers are really after notoriety and check how many people have gone to their posts.

I am not a blog follower of many blogs. The most I’ve followed anyone has been for the INTE courses. I have not searched for blogs, and I’ve not been interested in all of the promotions, such as the Project Runway. I’ve lost no posts, as I began way past 2006, the time when the new format of archiving began. I have my toe in the water, as it were, and am learning of the vast resources that are out there by virtue of those who blog.

Wikis is a whole other world. I have gone to Wikipedia but have not been an active part of any Wiki, not even for my work in education. In part I think it is me and time frames, and the fact that we have not used them for collaborative work either, as we use Google docs. I can appreciate their function, I see the value, but again, I am not drawn to that type of information gathering as others are, that element of research and reporting is not alluring to me. Wikis are definitely more collaborative in nature than blogging. I return to my earlier comment of time.

I know there is a vast amount of excellent resources waiting for me to discover them. If they are in a sense mandated through work or through CU Denver, I will be exploring them. Conversely, if they are not, then the time may come for me to discover them. I am not just drawn to explore all that exists. The courses I have this spring semester, INTE 5340 & INTE 5665, coupled with the text, New Literacies, have done more to introduce me to the digital world. I know from the Trends class, INTE 6750, that just when I think that all might settle and remain unchanged for a time in the digital realm, it won’t. I will probably be a user that tries to keep up with what is immediately being used around me vs. venturing out to explore the latest newcomer in  the digital world.