A Blogpost about Blogging

I don’t have any problems with blogging mechanics. Creating a blog is fairly easy as I have experience blogging for the quite a few years. The only difference lies in platforms. I’m maintaining two blogs, my personal profile at Wordpress (tienmaiminh.wordpress.com) and our university TESOL conference weblog on Weebly (opentesol.weebly.com), both of which are not very active. For this course I’ve created a Blogger page at tien-mai.blogspot.com so that I could follow other teachers easier and vice versa as we’re all using one blog service provider.

Bloggers who could have the equal status of Op-Ed contributors takes lots of time and efforts to craft a decent post. I believe that insightful content is what matters most. To improve the blog’s readership, a post should be either pragmatic or entertaining. Otherwise, bloggers could be discouraged as there aren’t many visitors to the page. Blog stats don’t lie. Very often the writers’ block is always lingering when the thought of getting down to writing has just popped up.

The blogging process could be described as follows:

Following-Reading-Reflecting-Writing-Publishing

The last function, publishing, is a million-dollar button. Before the advent of social media, I think blogging had built the first cornerstones of digital journalism: everyone could be a reporter, a channel or a whole broadcasting network. Especially in regions where mass media was censored by the government, bloggers could reveal untold truths in opposition to propaganda.

In educational contexts, I think there aren’t many famous teachers-bloggers. One possible reason is that we are all busy lesson planning, marking papers, attending faculty meetings and workshops, etc. As mentioned above, setting a blog is easy, the much harder thing is to maintain it and to invite quality discussions.

I hope one day my blog can hit a thousand viewcounts per week (and then per day or per hour). Too ambitious? But that’s how I define my blogging success.

Tien

Vietnam