Technicalities of moblogging

At first, I thought I would use blogger for the mobile blogging project: the app is free and available on Andriod and iPhone, and is easy to use.

I envisaged creating group blogs and inviting the students as authors.

However, one draw back to this is that the students need to sign-in with a gmail account. I'm not sure how many students have gmail and whether they would want to sign-up for it and create a blogger account. It seems like a lot to ask technically. So I started to investigate the other platforms available.

I found this useful link: http://searchengineland.com/do-mobile-blog-templates-have-enough-substance-for-seo-76732 which lists the pros and cons of Blogger, Wordpress and Posterous for mobile blogging.


I experimented with all three, creating an account and downloading the apps. By far the easiest for me to use was blogger but that is probably because I am already familiar with it.

Wordpress has more options for authoring content which is nice but could lead to more confusion for my students, not all of whom are digitally literate or native (Prensky).

Posterous was a new platform for me. Creating an account was easy but downloading the app to my old Andriod phone was a pain and wouldn't work for a while. This kind of technical difficulty could be really hard for a non-native speaker.

There is further information on mobile blogging sites here:  http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3120-9-Tools-for-Mobile-Blogging

Moving away from blogging sites, I investigated Twitter and facebook.

The problem with twitter for my project is that you need to use the # to group your posts. Plus, I think my students will feel too exposed.


My final investigation was facebook; most of my students have facebook accounts and some already update their pages using a mobile app so this was a positive start.

I created a private page called group one and invited a member to join. We were both able to update content from our phones really easily. This seems like the winning solution to my project but it does have some drawbacks:

The students have to 'friend' each other (if not already friends) to join the group or they have to 'friend' me so that I can put them into groups. This might be too much of an invasion of their private social space and perhaps of mine too. Facebook does allow for security settings, so students can limit the access of their classmates to their personal information like photos or posts.

I have created a separate account for facebook as an educator so that my two 'worlds' can be kept apart as necessary. It will probably be useful to ask students their preferences for group members or to suggest they do the same and create an educational account.


However, in terms of access and ease, facebook is the platform I have chosen for my mobile blogging project.