Documentation:WordPress Basics/Uses and Benefits
Uses and Benefits
...blogs and wikis have been applied in hundreds of instances for a wide array of teaching and learning applications. Professors use blogs to make big classes feel smaller by sharing resources and news, and allow students a quick means of offering feedback or questions. Graduate students use these spaces to document research processes and to connect with peer communities from around the world. Course blogs give students a unique, personalized platform for finding their own voice and sharing it...The blog is essentially a parallel conversation to the one held in-class, facilitating tangential inquiries, commentaries and responses in a way that not only increases the calibre of class discussions, but actively contributes to an open, web-based intellectual community. - Matthew Blunderfield, Science Fiction and the City [1]
Blogging allows you to share your thoughts, views, ideas, observations and learnings via an online journal of sorts. Most blogging applications allow you to upload your own (or other shared) media files. An important feature of blogging is that (through reader comments) it allows you to build a community of people who are interested in what you write and you want you to read what they write. Blogs can come in many flavors and have many uses beyond the single author, journal type blog. It may look like a website or a portfolio. It may include many authors or just one. It can be about text or just images.
Why would I choose a Blog?
- No use of HTML editors (or even knowledge of HTML) is required.
- A blog is basically an easily updated web page.
- It gets as simple as maintaining an email account.
- You can customize the look and feel of your blog space.
- Multiple authors/readers can contribute to content.
- Visitors can engage with other readers and your content through comments.
Academic uses
- Course website
- group authoring on a blog
- peer review/editing with comments
- class webspace development - adding annotated links/building a shared resource for a class.
- personal portfolio - upload media (e.g. slides, video, images of you artwork)
- connect with others in the university community to share thoughts and resources
Notes