As I read blogs, and I read a lot of blogs, I marvel and wonder about what keeps each blogger writing. I wonder when in their day they find time. What inspires them to choose that topic? What makes them believe that what they are writing is worth blogging about?

Last Friday I attending UBC’s Noted Scholar Lecture Series sponsored by The Center for Cross-Faculty  Inquiry in Education (CCFI). This one, A Faculty of Education Celebrate Learning event, Learning 2.0: Digital Cultures, Media and Citizenship for a New Millennium, featured Megan Boler, Darin Barney, and Douglas Kellner.  All three were fascinating with different perspectives on the role that digital culture and new media are playing in the creation and participation of citizenship in today’s world. Megan Boler spoke to her research which really looks at how people are participating and making sense of what she refers to as “truthiness” – that stance that politicians or others take that they are certain about something whether it is true or not.  She distinguished between video (tv, online video, etc.) and blogging, finding that the same truthiness is not generally found in blogging, but is indeed in “viral video” productions which more often invokes satire and humour.  Darin Barney spoke more to the increased politicization of technology and then Doug Kellner, in a very humorous and down to earth presentation explored the idea of media spectacle through tracing the US election thus far.  All this lead me to think a bit about the role that blogging is playing in politicizing us and involving us in more active citizenship.  So bloggers may blog for political reasons, to sway an audience, to provide a point of view or some kind of “truthiness” to borrow Boler’s phrase.

Certainly that is true in educational blogs as well. Educational bloggers, like political bloggers, blog to share ideas but is it more than that.  Are we blogging to create a “camp”? to sway others to our way of teaching?