By giving a fellowship to blogging innovator Dave Winer, Harvard University points* higher education in the direction of the on-the-run web collaboration and publishing known as blogging. A blog or weblog is a web page containing frequently-updated entries on a topic, usually posted in a column with the newest entry on top. The software supporting weblogs allows single writers or teams of collaborators to prepare and post new entries to the web very quickly, without writing html or other code required by older forms of web page. Other materials, such as a space for readers to comment or a list of web links to related web sites, are common elements of a weblog.
A news story and interview with Winer announces the university's commitment to "the Internet's hottest new trend," which, says Winer, is "going to be a basic skill like e-mail or using a word processor." # Educators are just starting to explore the pedagogical value of this new technology.
Elsewhere, on his History of Weblogs site, Winer offers this definition:
Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc. #
"Blogging comes to Harvard" by Paul Festa, CNET News, February 25, 2003.
Note:
*I look back on the rhetoric of my message with a bit of a shudder, knowing more clearly now how much work has already been done in this field by interesting people who have shared many ideas and examples in sites of their own. I would probably set up this message differently now, since some readers might be pleased to let me know that they didn't need any *certifying or *pointing to get to work. Addendum by KS, 3/20/03.
Hundreds of messages later, we're getting ready to go ourselves with a new vision for academic publishing:
http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog_comments.php?id=P2889_0_13_0