All right. I've been hemming and hawing since my last post, trying to temper my disdain for this new media. After all, I'm too young to be so curmudgeonly!

The more I think about it, the more useful I can imagine blogs to be. Especially after reading Harris' Blogging and the Media Specialist, part 2, I think I could transfer some of my enthusiasm for wikis over to blogs. All technology has an ugly side, but that doesn't mean we should ignore it all together right? Sure, some bloggers may take up bandwidth talking about the relative stretchiness of various superheroes (Corner Gas again), but others use the forum for good: it just dawned on me that I regularly visit a parenting blog that I like to believe is a force for positive change!

I just read Brain of the Blogger, and have decided I need to make an honest effort to discover the best of the blogs in order to understand the potential of the medium, rather than focus on the chaff I'm used to stumbling on. I found the article after browsing through Darren Kuropatwa's class blog and being genuinely impressed. Kids communicating about math, not just memorizing formulas, hooray!

I've long thought that all teachers should have a website to post class activities, policies, homework, etc. for parents and students. A blog is an easy way to do just that, without bothering to learn to code html or fumble through web-authoring software that so often makes a mess of things. And if we want teachers to embrace new technologies, shouldn't we go out of our way to make it easy? We all know (OR SHOULD, DARN IT!) that teachers are very busy folks who really don't need more put on their plates. Blogging might be the tool to help them stay better connected to communities without asking too much more of their time.