Serendipity35

Lists of the "top" of anything are debatable, but we were happy to note (a bit late) that Serendipity35 made the list at http://universitywebinars.org/top-higher-education-blogs/.

The list is useful in that it will probably alert you to some other higher education blogs that you were not aware existed in blogland.

Here is their stated METHODOLOGY for the selections:

At the end of 2012, we looked at college and university blogs as a key source of new, meaningful information.  In order to identify the most useful resources, we ranked the blogs we came across.  The sites we found cover a wide range of ideas and concepts, but our methodology stayed the same.  To create this list, we audited blogs at two different levels.

Level 1: We aggregated a list of over 200 higher education blogs that were already recommended by other respected sources.  We then analyzed each blog one-by-one, color coding the ones we would be most likely to recommend.
Level 2: Our editors visited the top recommended blogs, assessing them for post frequency, comment volume and engagement with the higher ed reader community.  They also looked a variety of other factors, including relevancy, helpfulness, insight, design, reputation and more.

I don't really need another place to blog, but the Writing Initiative that I direct at Passaic County Community College has an Initiative blog that we use to communicate with our campus community. Though some of the posts are directed directly at our students and faculty, a number of the resources we write about are useful to anyone doing writing across the curriculum.

For example, today's post is about an article from The New York Times on "Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools."

The tools include free online sites to help students visualize texts (with tools like Wordle, Tagxedo or The New York Times Visualization Lab), create timelines (using Xtimeline, Time Glider or Timetoast) and design presentations that go beyond PowerPoint (with Glogster.edu and Museum Box).

For prewriting, mind maps on paper, and now electronically, are popular idea-processing tools. Their use was popularized by the British IQ specialist Tony Buzan starting in the 1960s.

Bubbl.us, CoSketch.com and Cacoo are good starting places that also allow collaboration by student pairs or groups. Of course, students can also use The Times for generating ideas on many topics across disciplines from math to fine arts.

Bill Gates launched his personal blog called The Gates Notes this past week. He has a category for Education and already posted a piece on lifelong learning and some courses he has downloaded from The Teaching Company and a post on educational reform. He says that he will be posting about open courseware soon too.

The navigation is a bit too elaborate and I didn't find an RSS feed to subscribe, but it nice looking. It looks like he has good tech support.

Has Bill turned into an edublogger? Not quite, but it's certainly on his agenda.  I like that he has a category for what HE is learning about these days (economics is on that list).

From what I have read about the blog, it is actually Bill doing the blogging. I hope so, and I hope he keeps at it and doesn't pass the writing over to someone else.

Oh yeah, he's on Twitter now too.

Last week was the BlogWorld & New Media Expo which included the 2009 "State of the Blogosphere" report compiled by Technorati and delivered by their CEO Richard Jalichandra.


Since 2004, Technorati's annual State of the Blogosphere report has followed growth and trends in the blogosphere. This year bloggers were surveyed directly to provide the data for the report.


The 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey demonstrates that the growth of the blogosphere's influence on subjects ranging from business to politics to the way information travels through communities continues to flourish. In a year when revolutions and elections were organized by blogs, bloggers are blogging more than ever, and the State of the Blogosphere is strong.


Technorati released five segments that you can now access online. They started with demographics on Who Are the Bloggers, then onto the What and Why and the How of Blogging. The last two segments are of less interest to me and most educators - blogging revenues and their political impact - but are probably where the most interest is in blogging in the larger part of the blogosphere.


In addition to the survey results, there are also interviews with some big names from blogging:

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist
Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital, Micro Persuasion
Alex Santoso, Neatorama
Henry Copeland, Blogads
Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
Jonathan Salem Baskin, Dimbulb
Mathew Ingram, Toronto Globe and Mail
Seth Godin, Squidoo, sethgodin.typepad.com
Simon Mackie, Web Worker Daily
Dan Gillmor, dangillmor.com
Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr