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Blogger.com is a blogging platform owned by Google. It hosts blogs that are very easy to set up. Go to www.blogger.com, sign up and you can be publishing web pages through a simple WYSIWYG interface in minutes. Wordpress (WP) is another blogging platform. It's open source so you can download the software and install and run it yourself (as I do here) or you can go for a hosted version for a fee (www.wordpress.com). However if I were starting this blog again I would use blogger.
Wordpress has become slightly easier to use in later versions but still requires a fair bit of learning. What it does have is lots of plugins which give you lots of cool features. But whenever you hear "cool features" you also need to be wary of "bells and whistles".
Here are the important things you need to know about blogger:
It's free. You can run ads if you want on blogger but its up to you and you get a cut if you do chose to run them.
Its web-based. Blogger is Cloud Computing at its best. You can log in from anywhere, you don't need a server, a database, or to install or maintain anything.
It's easy to use. You don't see any of the nuts and bolts of the web. It's just point and click and you won't see a line of HTML (unless you want to).
You can use your own domain name. If you have a web address you can use this on blogger. But if you don't have a web address you get one from blogger (www.blogger.com/yourBlogName)
If you put all these things together you see a very powerful tool. Blogger is not just a blogging platform. It is a web publishing tool. It is a conentent management system. Budgets for web development could be slashed if people realised what Blogger is and what it can do. For me Blogger is a game-changer. A disruptive technology that can change the way you work for the better (or collapse your business model).
Do you need a VLE? Do you need a CMS? What do these things give you? And what is the overhead of using them?
Blogger may not be technically superior to say Wordpress or Drupal but it may be good enough.
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Eamon,
ReplyDeleteI agree blogger is great but for me its a stretch to say its a disruptive technology. In fact I'd be slow to even call it a technology, for me its a product.
Good point. Maybe it is an example of a type of technology and not a technology per se? A tool not a technology? I need to look these terms up!
ReplyDeleteEamon,
ReplyDeleteI really like blogger, however I would never use it as a substitute for a VLE and although I see it as an improvement I don't see it as revolutionary. I would be interested to hear you expand on wnhy it might be better than a VLE (unless you are referring to those who just want an easy and fast publshing tool - eg just for notes and announcements)
brian
@Brian
ReplyDeleteI suspect you are probably a VLE power-user. Having peered into many Moodle courses I can see that many teachers are not however and for them it would be fine as a publishing tool as you say.
However blogging has networking, social, interactive aspects too. For instance people can become members of a blog and post themselves or comment and in this case comments can be restricted to members. Or students could have their own blogs and link to the teachers blog via comments and trackbacks. In this scenario the blog is a powerful tool for the student - in effect an e-portfolio.
One of the indisputable advantages of VLEs is integration with institutional record and admin systems. However looking under the hood at this a bit myself it is often poorer than we give credit for. For instance where I work we download students grades from Moodle and then key these into a student records systems. Granted students get automatically enrolled and courses generated for them but the integration is not all that amazing at least from what I have seen.
I just realise I am defending a proposition I haven't really thought through here! Still I had a hunch that a recent institution's decision to use gmail as its institutional email system was insightful. In many cases there are superior tools out there to the ones we use.
Google still need slightly better product integration though - suppose google groups integrated better with blogger. I could create discussion forums via google groups, maybe by importing a spreadsheet of usernames and email addresses from my institutional student records system.
Many half-baked time-poor thoughts here :)
[...] says blogger is not really a “technology” but a product. I confess I do not know what technology is so I consulted a sophisticated academic research tool [...]
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