Affordances of Blogging...a single point and place in time.

Blogging (short for Web logging) has its origins in the mid 1980s or mid 1990s depending on your perspective. 

Certainly modern day blogging is attributed to early adopters such as Justin Hall (a student at Swarthmore College) but whilst the term is widely used today it’s important to note the affordances of the technology have a correlation to a single point and place in time.

What do I mean by this?

The term blogging as it is now widely known bears (in terms of technological affordance) little resemblance to its predecessors.  Blogging in the 1980s and 1990s involved a different skill set and showed far less affordance than those of 2015.  In days gone by bloggers required coding skills akin to an engineer launching the space shuttle. 

This high skill level produced (on screen) a hideously ugly, single coloured text with poor definition.  Likewise for effort versus output, images were low resolution and for an amateur took about two weeks to align properly on the web page.  Coupled with this were low internet bandwidths which made video streaming either non-existent or very low quality and paid web hosting was required to get into the game.

Still this was a leap forward in affordance (for educational purposes) with updatable text, hyperlinking and asynchronous connection.

By contrast a 2015 blog is free, and very easy to use with a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing system.  In the table below I have outlined some of the affordances of modern blogs as they relate to education, version 2015…see below 

Table 1: Technical features, affordances and pedagogy – analysis of technology

Features of the technology	Affordances (activities and practice)	Affordances (examples of pedagogy and designs)
Ability to input, change and link text easily	Allows updating easily to ensure currency of content. Allows multiple authors for collaboration. Linking from text to text, content material to content material facilitates learner centred teaching.	Allows for collaborative development of resources by Lecturers and Students, Multiple Lecturers or Multiple Students.  Potentially utilised for summative or formative assessment or learning activity. Allows learners to navigate content based on their own experience, knowledge and interests.  Learners develop or modify individual schema based on prior knowledge, interests and grasp of concepts. Linking content material may be as simple as a definition or as complex as another full learning resource. Allows for Learner centred pacing. Participation in discussion threads may form part of formative or summative assessment and has potential to reduce transactional distance from both industry and the facilitator/lecturer etc. Encourages reflective thinking and problem or project based learning. Encourages exploration of technology by student and lecturer alike with the potential to produce the unexpected. Develops media and technology fluency whilst working within a discipline specific context. Video and audio presentations can be utilised as formative or summative assessments or as learning resources which allows students to learn via preferred learning mode. Allows complex processes (previously only explained face to face) to be explained in detail.  Eg. Complex skills. Potential to develop higher order thinking skills
Asynchronous connectivity	Participants (closed or open communities) connect based on their own learning schedule.
Discussion and comment features	Allows closed or open comment/discussion threads to be introduced.   Open comment/discussion may include industry personnel from an International Community and display multiple views on subject matter.
Ability to embed multimedia resources	Allows visual (still images and video) and audio content material to be introduced in a holistic approach to content.
Low barrier to entry (free open access and easy to use).	Supports those from low socioeconomic backgrounds and gives voice to those willing to learn the technology.

Whilst I’m excited by the ease and affordances of this iteration I’m also excited by the future.  

With the rate of change in technology approaching ‘warp speed’ (sorry couldn’t resist the Dad joke irony) I’m also excited by ‘what will be’ and how we can adapt it to our respective fields in education.  All whilst looking at it through a TPACK lens and constantly aiming for the small intersection of the best of technology, pedagogy and content knowledge.

For now though I’ll enjoy blogging 2015 style.