Everyman(woman) his (her) own historian

Carl Becker, 1931 president of the American Historical Association, once said that everyman would become his own historian.

Certainly, it's true that blogs have allowed people to become their own journalists.

Fernette and Brock Eide have shown that blogs can do for journalists and personal opinion what popular and social history has done for the masses: people can create their own content and expose themselves to quality information, adding their own reflection and interactive capabilities to those of so-called experts.

Now more than 5 years old, the form, according to Richardson, continues to allow students the ability to monitor each other's work while building on knowledge collaboratively. More significantly, as he points out on page 31, blogs provide students with new tools to edit. No longer at they subject to the whims of an English teacher wiht a red pen. And blogging can add a further dimesnion - follow up and feedback, something Richardson calls "Complex Blogging."

I've never used a blog in class, probabaly because I've had the use of much narrower tools like Ning or Wikispaces. which provide for equal degrees of collaboration. Rooted in the ongoing but short-lived blogging tradition, those comments on Ning were essentially easily done examples of comment sections on more traditional blogs.

At least, Chuck Norris thinks so. He inveted them. And he's mad at Al Gore for stealing his idea.