Blogging is the technique of posting individual entries to a dynamic webpage with the newest entry displaying at the top of the page. A key feature of blogs is the ability to comment on individual entries. If the blog owner has enabled commenting, a viewer can post his or her reactions to the content in the entry. Blogs have become popular as a way for people to keep an online journal. Blogs also have applications in education as a way for students to reflect on class lectures and interact with other students via commenting. As a student in the college classroom I have used blogs in classes to write reflections on class lectures and engage in discussions with fellow classmates. Blogs may also be a solution to maintaining digital portfolios where a template is provided to display content and each entry is tagged as a specific type of content (i.e. artifact, reflective statement, etc.) and is automatically displayed in the proper location. I have created a blog that I maintain as part of my digital portfolio that is a log of my thoughts, reflections, experiences, and professional development as a student and as a future educator.
Moveable Type
Moveable Type is a blogging platform that can be used for anything from educational blogs to professional blogs. Moveable Type is installed on the same Mac OS X Server running the QuickTime Streaming Server and FileMaker Pro Server. Moveable Type provides a powerful, yet easy-to-use platform for blogging that students and faculty can use. Some key features of Movable Type are:
- RSS/Activity feeds
- Customizable search
- Unlimited blogs
- Extensible interface
- Customizable templates
- Comments and trackbacks
- Unlimited categories and subcategories
- Multiple categories for each entry
- Plugins (available from third-party developers)