What do we use blogs for?

For this first module I have decided to publish my own blog as a discovery exercise (Sorry for being so late!!).

According to the exercise  if I had to choose one single goal of having a blog like the one you are reading now, it would be to ‘extend my own voice in a new learning community‘ such the one surrounding the #EmTechMOOC. I am going to use the #EmTechMOOC category to identify all the post related to this mooc.  [URL: https://aprendoylocuento.wordpress.com/category/emtechmooc/%5D

To be fair, I think that a blog can be used for many diferent reasons or objectives. In fact, this blog was born a few years ago as an  eportfolio for an online degree about elearning training from the UNED (the open university in Spain).

A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a friend and we were talking about technologies, and the impact and possibilities of those technologies on education and we came to the conclusion that blogs are a useful tool to have a personal reflection & a background of your own activity… As she lives in the US, we have also been talking about politics and, of course, also D. Trump araised into the conversation… but that’s another topic…

Let’s stick to the point. At the end of the conversation I shared with her, my opinion regarding blogs is that they are a fantastic tool not only to be used as a way to ‘expand our voice’ but also as a personal portfolio and a kind of extension/archive of our lifelong learning activities. In the past I used other blog to provide some extra materials to my master degree students in Moroco (PortfolioTIC y ELE) and also as a kind of notebook to present and enrich some topics for a teachers’ training course in Spain (Secundaria frances). Those blogs are also useful for new students nowadays: They have just discovered something interesting or useful for them on the blog and the use is that it is really a good and easy way to contribute to the community…

One of the things I like the most about blogs is that they are permanent and we can use them as a personal archive that reflects your learning / professional activity throughout the years.  Another positive things is that they are simple to use and they allow you to share other multimedia artifacts such as presentations, videos, infographics, etc…It is a good plataform to integrate almost everyhing you do on the internet.

Personally, blogs are an essential instrument for my PLE (Personal Learning Envorionment), as I explained in that presentation in Spanish.

 

What do you think? What do you use blogs for? Do you find them really useful nowadays or have they been replaced by other tools, e.g., some socialmedia platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin? What do you use blogs for? To do so, which platform do you prefer: Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr,…Why?

Thanks for reading till the end and I hope to see your comments here on the coursera platform or  Twitter using the hashtag #EmTechMOOC.

Miguel