hello!

I have chosen to explore edublogging as an emerging technology as it has been becoming more widely accepted into education.

I will be exploring the application of the blogging technology to instruction. A preliminary question I will be investigating will be as follows: Are the reasons given by a number of detractors that dismiss or downplay the role blogs can play in instruction correct?

For example, the nature of blogging has evolved from the fringe of a few bloggers to become more mainstream, from being a one-author "guestbook", to making use of commenting, blogrolls, RSS feeds and aggregators, Tag Clouds, and widgets.

Yet despite the improvements to blogs over the years, and the technology has evolved and has been bundled into a web application such as WordPress, I have some questions:

Has the use of edublogs evolved to offer unique learning experiences different from other technologies?

Does edublogging better support specific learning and teaching activities?

Is there a place for edublogging in education?

Are there specific compelling reasons to choose blogging over other technologies?

I think that many of the criticisms of blogs are in fact not criticisms at all, and by judging blogs using the functionality of other types of applications (threaded discussion forums, for example), critics miss an opportunity for evaluating the unique benefits of blogs on their own merit.