"Blogging for Enhanced Teaching and Learning" by Marie E. Flatley

Flatley, Marie E. "Blogging for Enhanced Teaching and Learning." Business Communication Quarterly 68.1 (2005): 77-80. 15 May 2009. (link)

Although this article, written in 2005 by Marie Flatley, is one of the oldest articles included in this annotated bibliography, “Blogging for Enhanced Teaching and Learning” does provide an interesting – albeit very brief – background of the origin and increased popularity of blogs.  Flatley notes that while “the rise of blogs seems to have occurred through their grassroots use by geeks, alternative media, and celebrities,” the two events that attributed to the prominence of blogs were “Howard Dean’s effective tool in raising money during his presidential bid and the effective use of bloggers in exposing the credibility of Dan Rather’s source in a political story on George Bush’s service record” (77).  To emphasize her point of the rapidly growing popularity of blogs, Flatley states in her article that the number of blogs is over 4 million. This figure may have been impressive in 2005, but in the beginning of 2009, the Times Online  reported there being close to 200 million blogs in existence.  The obvious differences between the two numbers provide quite a testament to the appeal of blogs among the general population. Throughout the rest of her article, Flatley discusses the benefits of blogs in academia, such as the ease in collaboration between students, opportunities for peer review, accountability to write for an audience, and convenient accessability.  

As a professor at San Diego State University, Marie Flatley teaches courses in Business Communication.  She has done extensive research on the topics of blogging and text messaging in business, as well as the productivity values of other technologies.  Flatley also seems to be one in the growing circle of academia to embrace the social networking tool of Twitter.  While I do not find “Blogging for Enhanced Teaching and Learning” to be of substantial use for its discussion of the benefits of blogs (Lara Ducate and Lara Lomicka’s “Adventures in the blogosphere: from blog readers to blog writers” and Lisa Zawilinksi’s “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking,” delve much deeper into that issue), I appreciate it for its brief commentary of what and who gave blogs the initial push into popularity.  I also thought the article brought an interesting perspective to the dramatic rise in blog creation: an increase of almost 5,000% from 2005 to 2009 is rather astounding.