thomas leverett weblog

weblog museum

A threat by Google has spurred me to action. Briefly, they have warned me that weblog accounts not logged into will eventually be deleted. Fair enough. I sat on that warning for a few months but cannot sit on it any longer.

I set up a lot of accounts. Often, I would set up a new email and set of weblogs for every new teaching assignment I had. Why not? It wasn't especially lying to have weblogs on their own accounts, since often I was teaching students how to log onto them and post things themselves. Sometimes of course students would mistakes and start their own weblog when they were trying to post on one. Or, rename the entire system with their own name (this apparently happened to the CESL student account, after I was no longer in charge).

The idea would be to gather as many of these accounts as I can find, and preserve them in such a way that they can be enjoyed and consumed as part of a larger display of weblogs being used in education. There are a few that were used for other purposes and of course, I may want to preserve those as well but possibly in another venue. The ones used for education alone - most for ESL students communicating to each other and about ideas that they've found in the U.S. - are extensive; there are many, used in a wide variety of ways. And I haven't really even found half of them.

I'm on my way, though. If you look at the big picture there are several things to keep in mind: 1) weblogs offer a unique, public way of presenting information; 2) they were extremely useful in teaching ESL in that they were like a public forum yet not heavily trafficked; in other words, students could feel like they were putting themselves out in the public square, yet not get the damage that a true public square would do; and 3) we are really talking about the early days of weblogs, when they first arrived on the scene and were being used for all kinds of purposes. This kind of "early days" era capture is, as in the case of automobiles and all kinds of other things, fascinating to people who study such things, and fascinating in its own right just because it was early. People will look back and wonder what the early days of linking, posting, writing, etc. was like. Weblogs themselves may fade into oblivion or get cornered into a unique slice of the public communications picture. But if they survive their early history will always be of interest.

Labels: cesl, internet, weblogs

posted by tom @ 12:10 PM