At first sight blogging, publishing on a weblog, seems merely a way to show one’s own opinions and ideas. What is different in a blog in comparison to traditional home pages on which people share their interests and hobby’s, is that from a communicative perspective a weblog not only transmits information through the internet, but also takes on a receiving role. Many bloggers give their readers the opportunity to respond to the different postings (through a comment and trackback function) and get involved in conversations through a weblog.

The weblog, or blog, is a webpage on which the author publishes pieces with the intention to start conversation. (Wijnia, 2004) This conversation is different from what we know from daily activities. In day-to-day vocabulary having a conversation with someone implies that you are in the same room at the same time. Weblogs are mainly text based and therefore the conversations that take place are a form of asynchronous conversation. People involved in the conversation are not physically in the same room or together at the same time. This means that through blogging you can easily have a conversation with someone from a different continent in a different time zone.

A blog could be a useful tool for learning as well. More and more teachers are experimenting with the use of weblogs with their students. See for instance Barbara Ganley’s blog and the article Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom, or the findings of my own experiment. One of the big advantages of blogs is that students can see what their peers do and thus learn from eachother. Next to that, the interaction between students and between students and teacher is not limited to the face-to-face time that has been scheduled. The weblog is there 24/7 and when creativity flows students (or teachers) can put it ‘out there’, even at 3 in the morning.

During my experiment, some of the students explained that it felt natural to sit behind the computer surfing around, chatting perhaps and check out the blog in between. This points out one of the the biggest challenges the educational system faces in the next few years. Schools are not dealing with the way teenagers learn. They are taught by people that grew up and finished their education before the internet era. Lots of teachers still lack the skills to teach current teenagers in the way they are familiar with and can understand. Loads of information is coming to them via the internet and everything they do is through the screen: the learning, the reading, downloading and listening to music, writing, designing and most importantly: communicating with the world. If for teenagers the screen is their umbilical cord to the world, why is there so little being taught through the screen in schools?

A starting point for discourse
The benefits of blogs and blogging for learning can be regarded from a more theoretical perspective. Looking at the theory of Habermas, we can distinguish three formal world perspectives: the subjective, the objective and inter-subjective perspective. (Kunneman, 1986) Weblogs can be used to express all three world perspectives.

In the subjective perspective, or personal sphere, self-expression is important. Photoblogs are a nice example that are used to quickly and simply share photographs. Digital photography has made this even easier, as digital photographs hardly need to be worked on before publishing. Photoblogs are primarily a form of self-expression but the same channel can be used to share knowledge about photography as well. Another use could be to practice writing in blogs, either expressive, prose or poetry, as well as for business use, to explore and sharpen ideas.

In the objective perspective knowledge sharing is the central issue. Looking at educational opportunities blogs can serve as a place on the internet where students can share their solutions to mathematical problems, for instance. Or the blog can be used as a shared space to link to other sources on the internet.

Finally, in the intersubjective perspective, weblogs serve as a platform for societal debate. Think of getting the public involved in politics or from a learning perspective getting students to discuss certain issues.

When more people start blogging, according to the formal world perspectives of Habermas, it is a logical consequence that networks will form, sometimes globally, around interests and topics. “Habermasian new spaces begin with individuals in ‘pluralistic differentiated civil societies’ who gradually unite in communities of shared interests and understanding. Using democratized access to a new form of mass media –the internet- these individuals engage first in self-expression, then engage each other in debate. In so doing, they begin to form new communities of discourse.” (Froomkin, 2003) The growth of the number of blogs on the internet (estimated at a little under 8 million and doubles every 5 months according to Sifry.com is a good sign that blogging for many people is a sensible way of connecting with others sharing the same interests and ideas, and there are indeed networks forming as a consequence.

The blogosphere does not operate in a vacuum communicatively speaking. Other channels for communication will be used beside the blog, such as e-mail, VoIP (internet telephony) and chat. Weblogs can best be seen as a starting point for discourse, a communication hub. (Wijnia, 2004) The weblog is a fixed marker on the internet that offers readers multiple communication channels to choose from to enter into conversation and participate in or start a discourse. By using multiple communication channels, like chat and VoIP, discussion will grow more intense and social ties will become stronger and thus enhance the learning experience of sharing different world views.