Personal Blogs

Abstract

I began blogging on September 24, 1999, before the term “blog” was commonly used. What started as a private, diary-like habit has evolved into a multi-site practice that spans personal reflection, teaching resources, archival work, and scholarly inquiry. Drawing on my longitudinal experience and a body of literature on blogging, digital scholarship, and memory, this post argues that blogging functions as (1) a thinking tool, (2) an e-portfolio and public notebook, (3) a dissemination channel between journalism and scholarship, and (4) a community practice that develops voice, craft, and networks. I close with pragmatic implications for academics and students who are deciding whether—and how—to blog.

Introduction: From “Online Journal” to Digital Scholarship

When I posted to my first “online journal” in 1999, the dominant mode was intimate and iterative: you wrote daily, mostly “among friends,” and authenticity trumped polish. The subsequent proliferation of formats—corporate blogs, microblogs, podcasts, video channels—has blurred boundaries between diary, magazine, classroom, and broadcast. Through this shifting landscape, my own practice has remained anchored in one question: why blog at all?

My answer comes from three sources:

1. Longitudinal practice. I blogged daily for the first four years; later, I specialised across several sites (learning journal, swimming coaching, First World War oral history; ed-tech experiments).

2. Formal study. The MA in Open & Distance Education (MAODE) and the H818 Networked Practitioner module sharpened my sense of blogging as a method, not just a medium.

3. Literature. Research on blogs, digital scholarship, and memory sheds light on both the promise and limitations of blogging in education and public knowledge.
   
   

What “Counts” as a Blog?

The word now covers many things—some of which are not blogs in any meaningful sense: marketing brochures, magazines, audiovisual channels, or photo dumps. My original frame—shaped by early platforms like Diaryland—was that a blog is serial, reflective, tagged, and personally voiced, with an implied community of readers who may be known rather than mass. That said, the affordances (open access, chronology, hypertext, multimedia) scale to support teaching, public engagement, and research conversation.

My Trajectory and Use-Cases

1) Learning Journal & Portfolio (since 2010)

A tagged, searchable record of module activities and reflections. Roughly 40% private, 60% shared. It functions as an e-portfolio, a cognitive scaffold, and a map of what I have learned and can apply.

2) Swimming Teaching & Coaching

A dormant site that still outperforms others by daily traffic because it is useful: answers to practical questions, especially lesson plans. That datapoint matters—utility drives readership.

3) First World War Oral History

That is Nothing Compared to Passchendaele began as my grandfather’s memoir (machine-gunner; hours of recorded interviews, photographs). To respect the material and its audience, I am reframing it less as “a blog” and more as a curated digital book with citations and context.

4) Quick Response (QR) Codes in Education

Born of H818 conference work, this small blog explores QR codes to connect war memorial names to deeper biographies—micro-interventions that turn remembrance into networked inquiry.

Across these sites, I have learned a hard truth: some projects are better treated as books—or at least as book-like—demanding editorial discipline, versioning, and a publication horizon.

Twelve Functions of Academic Blogging (Condensed and Updated)

1. Dissemination. Preprints for ideas: from lab notes to lectures, from blog to paper/book.

2. Reputation & Voice. Thought leadership beyond institutional channels.

3. Teaching Support. Lecture notes, extensions, FAQs; a place to reflect with students.

4. Faculty PR & Recruitment. Human-scale narratives that attract people to modules and labs.

5. Community of Practice. Participation in a networked field; finding and being found.

6. Digital Literacies. Working fluently with web genres, tagging, linking, and process visibility.

7. Multimodality. Text, image, audio, and video as epistemic tools, not mere decoration.

8. Idea Incubator. Safe space to trial styles, hypotheses, prompts, and narrative frames.

9. Engagement & Reciprocity. Commenting, linking, and co-developing lines of inquiry.

10. Production Craft. Iterative practice in editing, curation, and public reasoning.

11. E-Portfolio. A longitudinal record: claims, evidence, feedback, revision.

12. Intrinsic Satisfaction. The durable pleasure of shaping thought in public.

Blogging, Learning, and Evidence: What the Research Says (and Does not)

The scholarship on blogging in higher education is mixed but instructive:

• Motivations and contexts matter. Students’ willingness to blog depends on audience, assessment, feedback culture, and how the activity aligns with disciplinary norms (Kerawalla, Minocha, Kirkup & Conole, 2009).

• Not a universal solvent. In some settings, students contribute haphazardly, avoid reflection, or stop once assessment ends; benefits do not appear by magic (Krause, 2004; Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Homik & Melis, 2006).

• However, it is a scholarly practice. Blogging now sits within the realm of “digital scholarship” (Boyer’s discovery, integration, application, and teaching; Weller, 2011/2012), providing quicker and more open circulation of ideas, and serving as a complementary layer to peer review (Bishop, 2013).

• Communities leave traces. Studies of weblog networks show how conversation, linking, and genre conventions coalesce over time (Anjewierden, 2006).

• Produsers, not just users. Bloggers are both producers and users who shape knowledge communities (Bruns & Efimova, 2008).

Inference: Blogging is most effective when it is integrated into authentic disciplinary practice, when the audience and feedback are real, and when it supports—not substitutes for—formal scholarship.

Blogging and Memory: Beyond “Total Capture”

As a diarist from age 13½, I have always been drawn to memory’s stubborn analogue core. Lifelogging technologies promise “total capture,” yet evidence suggests archives are rarely accessed and do not automatically support remembering; cues that prompt reconstruction may matter more than complete records (Sellen & Whittaker, 2010; Whittaker, Bergman & Clough, 2010). Blogging’s strength is precisely that: selective, contextualised cues—tags, a paragraph, an image—that re-ignite rich, reconstructive memory. In other words, curation over capture.

Why I Blog (Now): A Position Statement

1. To think in public. Writing clarifies thought; publishing invites friction that improves it.

2. To remember with structure. Tags, dates, and links turn lived time into a navigable archive.

3. To be useful. Posts that solve problems (e.g., swimming lesson plans) justify the effort.

4. To honour sources. Family histories, interviews, and field notes deserve a rigorous home.

5. To rehearse scholarship. Blog → talk → paper → chapter. The cadence accelerates learning.

6. To belong. Communities of practice—the “networked practitioner”—are sustained by visible, iterative contributions.

Practical Implications

For Academics

• Treat your blog as a scholarly instrument: cite, link, version, and reflect.

• Align posts to projects (grants, modules, books) and audiences (students, peers, publics).

• Use editorial rhythms (series, seasons) and book-like discipline when the material warrants it.

• Build feedback loops (comments, cross-posts, seminar responses) to enhance blogging and inform research.

For Students

• Use blogging as a learning journal and e-portfolio; keep some entries private and publish the rest.

• Write for a real audience (your cohort; your field), not an empty box.

• Prioritise selective curation over total capture; aim for cues that will help your future self.

Conclusion

I blog because it is the right balance of diary, draft, and discourse—a medium where private thinking meets public knowledge. It is more than a habit: it is a method that helps me learn, remember, teach, and contribute. Not every course requires blogging; not every project is suitable for a blog. However, where authenticity, iteration, and community matter, blogging remains one of the most humane and generative tools we have.

Selected References & Further Reading

• Bishop, D. 2013. Blogging as post-publication peer review: reasonable or unfair? LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

• Boyer, E. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.

• Efimova, L. (2008). Bloggers and “produsers.”

• Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup, G., & Conole, G. 2009. An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education.

• Sellen, A., and Whittaker, S. 2010. Beyond total capture: A constructive critique of lifelogging. Communications of the ACM, 53(5), 70–77.

• Whittaker, S., Bergman, O., and Clough, P. 2010. Long-term family photo retrieval. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 14(1), 31–43.

• Weller, M. (2011/2012). The Digital Scholar: The virtues of blogging as scholarly activity.
  
  Williams, J., & Jacobs, J. 2004. Exploring the use of blogs in higher education.

• Krause, S. 2004. When blogging goes bad: A cautionary tale.

• Anjewierden, A. 2006. Understanding weblog communities through digital traces.

No longer age 13 I don't keep a daily diary, though I did so into my ,,, early 40s. Give or take five or six years (or more) where a close relationship, marriage and children negated the desire to reflect ... 

In the past i saw reflection as a valuable tool to build towards career and project ideas - but you tip over a virtual watershead at some point where a dairy, daily or otherwise, is looking back. I try to keep a log of stuff I do AM/PM - best divided into three parts though: morning, afternoon and evening. I sleep 6 1/2 hours on average and get at least 1 hour, sometimes 2 hours of real work done before 6.00am. It's how I work. I wake, I have something to do, I get it done and either my sad laptop's battery requires plugging in or I start to feel tired - joy! I love sleep, and love going to bed to do exactly that whether it is 10.39pm having watched a movie, 4:38am having been up in the middle of the night, or if I have felt around 1:39pm that 'Forty Winks' are required. 

Make what you will of this; I rather think everyone has their own pattern of sleep, not asleep, active and alert or not ... like a fingerprint. My sleep pattern defines me. 

If the magic course on woodland management or environment conservation exists as a postgraduate degree I might seek a way to finance it over a new car. Open Learn offers stuff like this for free. But 'Free' never got me on the starting line ... or got me over the finish.