A couple of rants back, I made a comment that I didn’t really think Pulse, District Administrator’s new blog, was really a blog.
In the comments, Andrew asked me to define the difference between a blog and what Pulse was doing.
After all, Pulse seems to fit the Wikipedia definition. The site is using a classic blog format (if anything this new can be called “classic”) with relatively short essays posted in reverse chronological order.
What I think is missing is a personal voice. To me a blog is all of the mechanical stuff above but also represents the thoughts and ideas of one person or, occasionally, two or three people.
Pulse, as good at the contributers are, is presenting the views of a large group of people writing on a wide range of subjects. The only unifying thread is education.
Of course, all of this is just my opinion (it’s my blog; I get to do that :-). Look around the web and you’ll find quite a few variations.
But the concept of a blog representing a personal voice is an important distinction compared to other types of web publishing.
Especially as we look at how our students are using these tools, and experiment with how they could be using them.
Tim,
As blogging becomes more and more part of the vernacular, espescially in education, I think it’s imperative we find language and terminology that distinguishes between these various flavours. I’m with you on your definition but you know as well as I do that the term “blog” gets lumped into the wide range of category’s from the myspace stuff to political rhetoric distinguishing itself as a personal perspective.
Something we’ll have to work on.