Becoming a blogger!

photo by a trying youth

Hi,

Two weeks have already gone since when, for the first time in my life, I wrote a post in a blog, and with this ‘rite’ I was inititiated into the blogosphere, completely unaware that, in so little time, I would find myself updating my blog every second I can! Actually, my blog is really becoming ‘my living room’!

Obviously, in these two or three weeks I am attending my last English course at university, I have learnt several things about blogging: what a blog is, how to create my blog, how to send a good post, what the function of tags is, how to insert an image using Flickr, what rules belong to blog etiquette, how to search the blogosphere with Technorati, and so on.
It was, however, precisely e-tivity 2 which, unexpectedly, marked a turning point in my way of thinking about blogging: visiting a significant number of blogs made me abandon my strong belief that blogging was the latest rage among computer addicted people and that a blog was merely ‘a more technological and public version of a diary’, where one talks about his or her individual life. But what a wrong preconception!

I was positively surprised by the greatness and the variety of blogs…I had to reconsider them as creative and enjoyable tools not only to speak about our personal life and interests, or to keep in contact with ‘e-friends’, but also to widen our knowledge of the world through a constructive exchange of ideas. It is precisely this what I mostly appreciate about blogs: through them people can discuss not only frivolous things of everyday life, but also very relevant issues and events of public interest.
At this point a distinction should be made between you as writer of your blog and you as reader of other blogs:

- Writing your own blog means sharing your ideas and opinions on a topic in a virtual space where anyone can read them with the advantage of receiving other people’s comment – also from people that you do not know and that may live in a context/culture very different from yours. Therefore, it is a wonderful vehicle for spreading information, culture, ideas, plans,… and, first of all, for seeing other viewpoints, and thus broadening your horizons.

- As a reader of other people’s blogs, you can get a lot of information and sources on a given fact, theme, or problem; you can look for people who are keen on a particular thing and ask them for advice. I like thinking the blogosphere as ‘a huge, miscellaneous hyperbook’ free and available to anyone who just wants to read, read and read for educational or social purposes, or simply for his/her delight.

The use of blogs in the field of CALL, as a language learning tool, has been a revelation to me: thanks to the English blogging course I am attending, I can appreciate the usefulness of blogs to enrich my vocabulary and to practice different English registers (from formal to informal) with respect to both reading and writing. Moreover, on the World Wide Web there are a number of blogs dealing with language learning and translation, which are two fields I am particularly interested in; such blogs can be important sources of information and tools to improve our language skills. Of course, like anything you find on the Internet, you should always pay attention on the reliability and authority of the blogs you visit, especially when you do this for learning purposes!

Bye!

Elena