Blogging

Blogging offers both a new format for the casual essay and a potential update to the longstanding traditions of diarists.  This is a subject of great interest to historians, and yet it is still perhaps true that as late as 2016, nearly two decades into the blogging era, there is a significant degree of ambivalence and uncertainty about the format within academic history. Ralph Luker offered a useful history of the history blogosphere in a 2005 piece for AHA.  A well known blogger himself, Luker tried to rally fellow historians to the cause, but it’s clear from this 2009 piece by Jeffrey Wasserstein, that there were still a number of myths and misconceptions about blogging among members of the profession.  Even today, there are relatively few historians who find the time or energy to keep up a regular blog or to devote precious classroom time to blog assignments in their courses.  Rice University historian Caleb McDaniel has been making the case, however, that classroom teachers can –and should– make good use of such assignments in history courses.  His post on “Teaching with Blogs” offers important lessons and insights for anyone who is aspiring to create more powerful “born digital” learning resources in a format that increasingly seems destined to endure.