More Teachers and School Districts are using blogs and blog networks. But what about mentors and their pupils. This article is a great insight.

Blogs come to us as the latest in a series of technological innovations that have been hailed for their revolutionary potential (Mitchell 1999). They share in the utopic aura of the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, the wireless network and most recently the ipod.

On the other hand, blogs have also been dismissed as just another software program that encourages the internet equivalent of vanity publishing. Hailed as citizen journalists by some, bloggers are rejected, as just the latest incarnation of the scandal/attack instincts of tabloid journalism, by others. In education, blogs are pitted against their predecessors, (primarily discussion boards and email) which are now seen as “traditional” technologies.

While this is a simplistic overview of the blogsphere and its representations it begins to signal the complexity of the field in which blogging occurs and tries to understand itself. It signals something of the “it” moment in which blogging is currently being introduced to a wider public. However it is also indicative of the mechanistic way in which blogging is being explored and understood. Too many people are asking what blogs can do before they really understand what blogs are. I believe this is particularly true in the two spheres that concern me most as a journalism educator.

Via

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