Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Teachers Who Blog: The Problem of Acquiring an Accurate Count

I am interested in finding collaborators for a project involving getting a clear picture of the number of teachers who blog across the globe.

In my current research on using social software to support teacher professional development, I found myself asking, I wonder how many classroom educators (a) started a weblog and (b) continue to blog?

Turning to several academic databases as well as Google I found no evidence of any such data. I then turned to Technorati and searched under the following terms: teacher, teachers, teaching, and education.

I received the following results:

teacher -
491,199 posts tagged teacher
5,940 blogs about teacher

teachers -
8,122 posts tagged teachers
2,378 blogs about teachers

teaching -
17,664 posts tagged teaching
5,899 blogs about teaching

education -
117,595 posts tagged education
23,723 blogs about education

[Search conducted on Technorati June 26, 2008 at 8.05 AM EST.]

While this data is intriguing, it does not answer my initial questions. I then went in search for some benchmarks, something to compare these numbers to in Technorati. Unfortunately, I could find no way to adjust my search to a specific time period within Technorati. (Is there a step I am missing?)

Further searching led me to an article from the Houston Chronicle dated January, 29, 2007. The reporter noted that "[t]he number of blogs about "teaching" or "teachers" tracked by Technorati.com" had increased 10 percent in less than six months to "nearly 950."" Unfortunately, it is not clear from the article what 950 represents. Does it mean there are a combined number of blogs about teachers and teaching? Is that an average? Or are both terms showing 950 instances?

Given this limited data set, we can see that since the end of January 2007 to the end of June 2008, the number of blogs about teachers and teaching has grown 2.5 to a little over 6 times larger in 18 months. (How long will this trend continue? What's driving it? Questions for another day....)

So what other data would be useful for thinking about teachers who blog?

According to the Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007, there are 6.8 million teachers employed in the United States. The bulk of them (2.6 million) teach at the elementary and middle school level. The remainder include those teaching at the postsecondary, secondary and preschool and kindergarten levels.

Let's say for the sake of argument, of the 5,940 blogs about teachers, half of those are authored by teachers in the U.S. That would mean that there are around 3,000 teacher bloggers in the U.S. or approximately 1 blogger for every 2,000 teachers.

Does this sound right? Is there better data out there to make more informed estimates about teachers who blog?

Any thoughts or ideas on how to make this information more salient or reliable? Interested in collaborating? Let me know what you think.

Reference:
Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007) retrieved 26 June 2008 from http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/fac

Graph -- All theories proven with one graph