Our first Faculty Academy 2006 session after the general welcome was a plenary panel discussion/presentation on blogging at UMW. Session leader Steve Greenlaw enticed, coaxed, and otherwise motivated a whole raft of bloggers from many disciplines and both campuses into sharing how they’ve used (or in one case, refused to use) blogs in their teaching and learning.

The results, as you’ll hear, are quite varied. Taken together, they reveal for me a fascinating record of a particular moment in the life of what is still a new IT tool in many learning environments. My staff and I are finding that the idea of a blog is surprisingly resilient and capacious, and that a WordPress blog (for example) can be scaled from a personal journal to a full-blown content management system. That’s not just our discovery, of course; others in the blogosphere report that blogs can be the front end to a complete e-portfolio. I suppose my own fascination is that the notion at the heart of blogging–the narrative of a mind, linked to other narratives and cognitive encounters–turns out to be another way of thinking about thinking itself.

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