When Blogging Works For Educators

It seems like there is a regular stream of articles, often on blogs, talking about blogging going away. Or changing for the worse. Or other negative comments. But I find that there is a real place for blogging. I think this is especially true for educators. Blogs allow for a lot more detail and nuance than most other social media outlets. They also allow for people to build on each other’s words, ideas, projects, and thoughts.

Take for example a recent string on blogs I followed. Via Twitter I stumbled across an interesting post by Rob Underwood called Code Syntax Compared. I wrote a small post (Code in Different Languages) that added two more pieces of sample code but also brought up the subject of static typing and dynamic typing. The comments led to more discussion. This discussion brought up the value of learning different languages and the importance of learning the idiomatic ways of these languages.

Mike Zamansky who was one of the commenters on my post wrote his own follow up post (Teaching Coding - getting beyond superficial syntax). There is some conversation in the comments there as well.

So here we have a string of three posts – all related – all building on the conversation – all linking to each other as well.

This is blogging that works. It is idea sharing, conversation and educators learning from each other. Pretty awesome stuff if you ask me. Now I ask you, shouldn’t you be blogging too? Take a look at Doug Peterson’s take on teacher blogging at Your teacher blog.

I’d love to add more blogs to my Computer Science Education Blog Roll How about yours?