So many blogs, so little time

According to statistics posted on the BlogWorld conference site, 12 million Americans maintain a blog - is that possible? I guess we all like to get our thoughts and opinions out there and hear from others. But 1.7 million list making money as one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Hey, I think I'm missing something here!

Over 120,000 blogs are created every day. This is definitely information overload. But each one is a part of its own community - home schoolers, chihuahua raisers, artisan cheese makers, travel bloggers, fat bloggers, political bloggers, tech bloggers, scifi bloggers, our personal curiosities and our was of connecting with each other are endless. For adult educators, it's important that our learners understand this phenomenon, if they don't already. They can participate in it, become a part of and build national and international communities.

One more statistic, blog readers spend an average of 23 hours per week online. That sounds about right. Here's a chart of the number of unique visitors to the different blog hosts, comparing Q1 2004 to Q1 2005. Old numbers, but Blogger is still by far ahead of the crowd.

There are more blogs in Japanese than in English, but they are close, and far ahead of other languages, although it looks like all languages are participating. Chinese is third, with 8%.

Branka and I are doing a pre-conference session at CATESOL, and several other conferences, on blogging for language teaching and adult basic skills in general. The key is supporting learners to find their community of interest. There's something for everyone out there, and each person has their passions. The ability to connect with others who have the same passions is what got me excited about technology 15 years ago, and the root of it all is still the same.

Vokis from ESL Students

Kristi Reyes, who teaches VESL at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, CA, is also a technology mentor, and does so many creative projects with her students. I discovered Vokis a few months ago and posted my Voki here. Kristi had her students create their own, and you can view them on her blog.

She has also posted student slideshows and other projects - definitely worth checking out for examples of how to integrate technology in the classroom.

Other great projects by Kristi:

• Using Bubblr to create comic strips using Flickr photos. She links to an example that one of her students created to practice using a number of idioms.



• Using Bookr to create a book for the end of her summer class, also using Flickr photos.



• My favorite - she got tired of her students watching YouTube videos in the lab, so rather than banning YouTube, she created an assignment using Zentation where they had to write a description of the video, that plays as a set of slides coordinated with the video. This one cracked me up!

You can read Kristi's article in the MiraCosta ESL Newsletter. Scroll down to page 11.

The 15 Most Blogged Words

For some reason this struck me as very funny. Bloggers Blog reports about Oxford University Press monitoring 70,000 blogs to keep track of new words that should be added to their dictionaries. They also published this list of the 15 most frequently used words in blogs. You know that blogging is in a way a very personal and self-centered activity if three of the top six words are me, myself and my! What does it mean that the third word is stupid? I guess bloggers like to trash things, in the name of me, myself, and my personal opinion about everything in the universe. And - lovely? Must be a British thing.

15 Most Frequently Blogged Words
- blogger
- blog
- stupid
- me
- myself
- my
- oh
- yeah
- ok
- post
- stuff
- lovely
- update
- nice
- shit

Twitter: Take Two

Ok, I wrote a few days ago about Twitter that I don't get it - why would I want to get updates constantly about what my friends are doing? But...I got kind of addicted to twittering anyway. It's interesting to see what people are doing, people like Leo Laporte or Veronica Belmont, whose podcasts I've been listening to, and people like Jason Calacanis and Anil Dash who I know hardly anything about but I discovered them through looking at other people's friend lists, or at twitterholic which shows who has the most followers on Twitter.

These people post what they're doing, which is often flying somewhere or having sushi with someone, which is not important unless you're friends with them, but they also post links to their blogs, or blogs of others that they are thinking about, or links to conferences they are attending, and, following those links, I learn things.

Tonight, after a day of work on budgets and getting ready for CATESOL next week, and then a couple of hours of dancing, I came home and sat down to print my boarding pass, etc., and ended up checking my Twitter account, following a few links, reading about tags, about Ajax, about supporting the people of Uganda, and about the relationship between science and culture. I'm liking this! It feels like a time of intellectual ferment and development. These times seem to come and go in life. Maybe I've been missing that.