Stephen Downes writes about blogs as educational tools in Educause. I highly recommend you read it for yourself because it’s very well-balanced and insightful. I couldn’t resist including some of my favorite bits below.

…the events of September 11 brought home to me the immediacy of blogging. We ran ongoing coverage, submitted via SMS to my e-mail, as one of our own made her way from the dust and debris of New York’s financial district to her home on the west side. Blogging not only allowed us access to the event; it made us part of the event. And with that, the form had indeed finally come into its own.

Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content.

What makes blogs so attractive, in both the educational community and the Internet at large, is their ease of use. A blog owner can edit or update a new entry without worrying about page formats or HTML syntax.

As Richardson says, blogging as a genre of writing may have “great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking

Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting.

Educational Blogging, EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5