July 21, 2012 – “However, several students said that they were confused about how to use their blogs both in terms of posting material and responding to comments. One said, ‘I didn’t know where to put stuff. It was confusing’ and another that ‘we can comment on each other’s posts both in the blogs and in the forum, do I put it here [blog] or do I put it there [forum]?’ Sometimes this resulted in ‘a lot of people repeating the same comments they had on their blog, in a posting on the forum’ and this student eventually stopped using his blog because he felt there were too many place to have to go to.”
Source: Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup G., & Conole, G. (2009). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education. Journal of computer assisted learning (25), p. 38.
I have felt similar feelings while using my WordPress blog and my Twitter account. A few days ago, I listed out the pros and cons of each blogging platform. That information is duplicated below. If anyone cares to chime in and add their perspective to the list I’ve started, please do so.
Pros (strengths and advantages)
Blog
- Personal ownership of the space
- Control over content
- Meaningful writing
- Permanent and easily retrieved content
- Extended exposure; pushes my blog
- Great for short questions and links
- Hashtags (for organization)
Cons (weaknesses and disadvantages)
Blog
- Not as many people tuned it to my blog; not as quickly noticed or easily followed
- Requires more time to manage content and appearance
- Doesn’t centralize my posts and others into a single feed; hard to follow blogs from my blog
- Occasional ads on free accounts
- Posts too short for meaningful writing
- Limited multimedia capabilities (compared to a blog)
- Ads
- Hard for me to mentally organize the information (especially without hashtags)
