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.

Anything you might use. Think of yourself as an artist before the era of the portable camera. If you don’t sketch something now you’ll forget it. So with words and ways of expressing what you see, feel, do and think. Get those ideas and descriptions down as soon as you can.

Try to work them up that evening, that day. Within a couple of days. Think of this as nurturing a seedling that will have to be transplanted in a day, week, even in a year or five years time. It’ll wait for you, but only if you have made it robust.

Write, and rewrite, toy with it and layer it. Have you recreated a sense of the moment as it was experienced the first time? Maybe. This effort to recall the moment creates a multitude of connections in your brain, some logical, many not, some becoming fixed, some floating, all transformed every nanosecond more that you live. There is no stability in it, not on the page and never in your head.

Then use these ideas somewhere. In a short story, or in a character or context description. It’ll come in time. It’ll become easier.

No automatic recording device can do this for you. A gadget works in absolutes, in numbers. What it takes for you is fixed. Write it down.

Like many of us, I'm sure, I wordpress and go online. I conceive and store ideas on these things. None yet gets close to offering the emotional power of what I said, and where I said it forty years ago: in a school kid diary, in a letter to my grandfather, even typed up with the portable typewriter I got one Christmas. Boxed up and stored I know have a way back into the child's head, that young teenager's hopes and observations. I even printed out filed and boxed stuff from the Amstrad in the 1980s and the various MACs I had in the 1990s and that originated on the Psion in 2000. Anything I thought would be safe on a floppy disc, or Zip drive is probably lost. I can't figure out to read them on a modern device. A box full of paper is another thing.

At 53 my life has been short. At 89 my father-in-law is going through his 'archive' - an academic and educator his house has over the years become a physical expression of the contents of his brain. There are books three columns deep to the ceiling, there are bedrooms stacked with boxes of papers and newspapers. As most of his faculties fail he now has a PhD student at his side to give some order to his archive, and to his life. Sharing it with one, on paper, at this stage, has to be more rewarding and effective than doing it digitally in a blog with wiki-like affordances. 

Fig. 1 Amongst the many official tributes a personal commemoration of three brothers killed in the First World War

Lewes memorial remembers some 360 names; they've been pinned to specific addresses within walking distance of the memorial. In Southover Ward for the 75th anniversary a book was published detailing the lives of each person - their school record, photo and home and other information, such as playing cricket for the local team or where they worked.

Fig.2. Lewes Town Hall War Memorial

Will anyone remember us a hundred years after we have died?

Just as it is important for us to forget as a learning process and challenge, should society forget, filter or edit? Does commemoration in glorify war with its nationalistic, militaristic and religious connotations?

For the introduction of my H808 ECA I've visualised a Movie Poster.

This comes from a Sunday Newspaper, in 1975.

This image, along with some shots of the diary went into a blog in 2003. In 2006 I tried to establish which paper this image came from and failed. You'd imagine something right wing like the Sunday Telegraph, though it is more like to have been the Observer, or even the Radio Times? Strikingly there was no view taken on this pose looking for all intense and purposes like one of Hitler's Aryan few. The thinking behind it was that by 2025 we'd all be mixed raced, bald (for no apparent reason) and semi-naked due to our ability to control the climate.

The only reason I chose this as my personal movie poster for now is a desire to reconnect to my youth and a sense that I had a future, another 14 years at least! I wouldn't mind getting fit again too, overweight at 90kg and doing no exercise for several years has me far, far, far from this absurd image. Though age 19, with hair, this was me courtesy of swimming every day for an hour or more and sailing/windsurfing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Heady days.

Politically I should mention here that I swing between green, yellow, blue and red ... ocasionally even purple. I blend my vote too, rarely voting for the same lot between local and national elections and often preferring the independent choice. At uni I was a member of both the Conservative and the Labour parties

Who cares? I do. I can keep them all at arms length, especially the two parties that keep asking me to stand ... oh yes! My busy body considered an asset in local refuse collection, building, transport and various pollution issues. I should keep my mouth shut, but as you can see, I don't and it isn't difficult to point content like this (editted) to a person that matters.

For the conclusion I've visualised a Film Review.

I've also done a cartoon of one of the course authors as a weightlifter with the words RESEARCH on one end of the bar and the word PRACTICE on the other; the idea being that you get mentally fit by doing a work out that balances research and practice.

Where I come unstuck is with the PDP matrix.

From Drop Box

I look at this and I see a train station message board on some concourse such as Crewe with few destinations of interest. I'll have to work on this.

The least  I want is the Message Board at St. Pancras International with Paris, Lille and Brussels written up, though my most inspired train message board will always be Gar du Nord, Paris. As a teenage my jaw always dropped to see destinations like Berlin, Moscow and Turin, where across the channel pre Eurotunnel you were supposed to get excited about Ore, Doncaster and Birmigham International

Any ideas? Perhaps if I visualised it as an Advent Calender? Or a box of chocolates (life, is after all, life a box of chocolates according to Forrest Gump).

Ideas on a plate please.

P.S. A reminder to myself to dig out a collection of scrapbooks from 1987-88 when I was at London's, School of Communication Arts and perhaps a reminder to start doing this again. Or do I? I'm getting into the habit of photographing things that catch my eye, uploading, cropping and fixing, then tagging and putting them online. Perhaps I'm a candidate after all for the e-diary, a record of everything, all day.