What Is Blogging For?

Okay, blog readers. Put on your instructional designer hats for a moment, because I'm going to be talking about instructional design this time around.

I've been reading (in order, from the beginning) a blog by instructional design expert Professor Karl Kapp. The blog begins in late 2006, and I've read a good seven and a half years of content so far.

The professor mostly discusses the developing technologies he believes will change the face of learning. The three technologies he talks about that stick out to me are 1) virtual worlds, 2) video games, and 3) blogging.

The blog starts when virtual world Second Life (which I previously had barely heard about) was apparently in its heyday. Professor Kapp hails virtual worlds as being one of the next great technologies of learning. Was he right? Well, I'm not caught up to the present in the blog, so I can't say if he's still posting about virtual worlds or if any real learning developments have taken place there. But I can share my thoughts. I never participated in a virtual world such as the ones Professor Kapp extols, but around that time I did play a fair amount of Neopets, Millsberry, and Webkinz, which are sort of like virtual worlds for kids. I call them "virtual worlds" rather than "sites" because, in my definition, a virtual world is any website where you can do everything you can do in real life (earn and spend money, eat, change clothes, socialize, decorate a home) plus a few things you aren't able to do in real life (take tae kwon do lessons, search for mythical beasts, make crème brulee like a pro). They are very fun, to be sure.

However, the problem with these virtual worlds is the same thing that makes them so fun: they're like another life. It's difficult to live a real life plus an extra virtual life on the side...but it's hard to play in a virtual world casually...but it's unsustainable to stay active in a virtual world if you're going to take your real life seriously. For that reason, I think virtual worlds are better left alone, and for that reason, I don't think they're the future of learning. I think that, for purposes of putting learners in situations that it's difficult to replicate in real life, virtual realities (using virtual reality goggles) or augmented reality (where virtual images appear in a real-life environment, à la Pokémon Go) would be better. It would be harder to lose yourself in those technologies as they require moving about in real space.

Now, video games. I do believe that people can learn skills by playing video games. As I might have said in the past, my family didn't have a gaming system when I was growing up (and I'm absolutely terrible at Mario Kart because of it). Instead, when we wanted to play games, my sisters and I would play Nancy Drew mysteries on interactive CD-ROMs.

A few months ago, Little Sister and I went with some friends to an escape room. We eagerly anticipated being awesome at the escape room, having played so many games where we were super sleuths. Sure enough, it quickly became clear that Little Sister and I had learned mad skillz from our game. We'd learned hard, physical skills (shading pads of paper to find indentations from previous notes; examining everything in the room; checking doorknobs and saying "It's locked") simply by making Nancy perform them. We'd also learned some soft skills, such as finding connections between seemingly unconnected items, not being afraid to try even the wildest ideas, and stepping away from a difficult puzzle to work on something else for a while.

If we learned all that from playing simple games on a PC, then who knows what else we could learn? I will assert, though, that if you can learn something positive from a game so effectively that you can actually replicate it in real life, then you can learn something negative from a game and also have it transfer to real life. Specifically: violence. I don't understand how some people laud games as being able to teach good skills but deny that games can also teach violence. It necessarily goes both ways.

The last technology, blogging, is the one I really wanted to share with y'all. Professor Kapp's blog begins when blogging was a fairly new idea. I find his view of blogging to be so fascinating. He uses blogging in ways that I would never have considered. For example, whenever he releases a book, he does a "blog book tour"—he schedules different blogs relevant to the book's subject to do a review post on a certain day. The professor then directs the traffic from his own blog to the reviews. This means exposure for the book and new readers for both the reviewing blogs and Professor Kapp's blog.

Most notably, he keeps referring to blogging as a learning tool or technology. My initial reaction to this idea was, "That's not how I think of blogging at all!" But then I remembered that in my first post, I essentially said that my blog was meant to educate people about what LDS people are really like. That being the case, most of the time I tend to think of my blog more as a newsletter...or a diary...or a travelogue...or an entertainment outlet. I guess I think my blog is for a lot of things.

Which begs the questions: what is blogging for? I'm not asking this rhetorically. I'd like everyone, from Baby Brother to my friends to the bright intellectuals I met at college, to tell me why they either read blogs, or write blogs, or both. I'm curious. I want to know. I want to learn.

Go on. Share in the comments: in your opinion, what is blogging for?