To Blog or Not to Blog

Stephanie and I had dinner last night with some great friends, and the conversation turned to blogging (go figure). There was quite a heated debate with folks lining up on either side of the debate, although I seemed to be the only pro-blogger (and I'm even very much a latecomer to it.) Anyway, most of the people who attended this dinner couldn't understand why so many people are drawn to blogging. There was disbelief expressed over how people have time to read what amounts to other people's journal entries (sometimes focusing on daily minutiae) and then to comment on the blog entries. "Who cares?" was the opinion often expressed about the content of typical blog entries.

I must admit sometimes, when I'm reading someone's blog entry about something the person saw in the newspaper that day or about something funny that a colleague said or some such example, I sometimes think, "Why am I reading this?"

Of course, my interest in blogging is coming from an eduation point of view and, as someone who teaches future teachers, and who researches "new literacies," I feel I need to be part of the blogosphere, even though usually I'm just a lurker. Just to give one example of a positive blog resource (one, ironically, that I first heard of on a broadcast television program--The NBC Nightly News), there is a guy who has created a blog consisting of old letters that were written by his grandfather during WWI. He is typing them into his blog daily exactly 90 years after they were written, as if his grandfather had a blog from the warfront. He's not telling what happened to his grandfather, so the reader has to check in with the blog every day to see what happens. What a great resource for a teacher who is teaching the WWI era! I will probably check in from time to time with the blog to see what happens to his grandfather. Although, I probably won't have time to comment.