Using Blogs as Data Sources

Blogs have many of the qualities that make the web itself so valuable for education. They can be current, idiosyncratic, and specialized. Most interestingly, they have personality and humanity. Blogs have a point of view and often contain a freshness that highly edited pages lack.

When designing lessons that use web resources, consider adding some carefully selected blogs as sources of information. If you're teaching about a war, for example, add some first hand accounts from Iraq. If you are teaching content that is used in a particular career, add some blogs by practitioners of that domain. Here, for example, is a blog about an archaeological dig in Egypt. And one from a Navy doctor.

How do you find appropriate blogs? There are at least two ways.

1. Do an advanced Google search using "blog" or "weblog" as search terms along with an additional term associated with the content you're after. Here, for example, is a search of biology AND (blog or weblog).
2. Search EatonWeb, which helpfully categorizes over 20,000 blogs.
3. Search Technorati, which scans over 7,000,000 blogs and other news sources.
4. Search blogarama, a newer directory that's growing fast.

Practice

Pick a topic you teach that might benefit by the use of blogs as one source of information. Use the two techniques above and see what you find.

© 2005 - Bernie Dodge. Write for permission to use elsewhere.