A couple of really interesting comments overnight / yesterday:

A 'jaded' Lindon Parker says (in relation to RSS, weblogs etc.):

"..BUT the ground swell appears to be having little or no impact upon cheque signers..I can build customised RSS Aggregators that integrate with wikis, blogs, XML, swiss cheese(OK maybe not swiss cheese, brie maybe but not swiss...)etc, until I'm blue in the face but so far no one has shown the slightest interest in supporting a business model for one..and by that I mean paying me in some way I can feed my family... The more I look at the EduBlog space the more I think this is all falling apart through lack of interest, not on your or the other RSS/Bloggers part but on the part of the institutions that might want to implement them"

&

Mitra comments in relation to the Good Question thread prompted by 10 Reasons:

"From another perspective - yes there are tools that do everything from making the coffee to delivering courses online. But there are good reasons why we keep screwdrivers in our toolboxes. The complex tool designed precisely for the job will probably do it quicker, but adapting the complex tool to a job it was designed for is often MUCH harder than using a simpler tool. Its the same with WebLogs (and other CMS systems), they can be easily adapted for many tasks while a specific tool is often very hard to adapt to even a slightly different way of working."

11:58:52 AM    

Greg @ ten reasons responds to my response to his thoughts about the use of weblogs in education (or something like that, hyperlinks agogo)

Again, thanks for the check, shouldn't go throwing hyped terms like KM about (especially when I agree wholeheartedly that it's unpossible). It does help me 'manage' (or 'organize' 'add semblance of reasoning' 'engage' etc.) my mind though and if used in order to 'share' knowledge (through personal publishing) is a pretty obvious tool. A Knowledge Sharing tool?

(and just because it might not be called that doesn't mean it isn't it. I used the TV guide to whack a huge Aussie spider the other day, 'twasn't meant for that originally but did the job just fine... :o)

So, I guess the question is what are / could weblogs (and associated tools, RSS etc.) be good for in education? And where are they just discrediting themselves by trying to be something that they're not?

Perhaps we could start with VLEs... I wonder what I could do with a copy of Manila, a few open source tools & someone who knew what they were doing with the code that Blackboard couldn't ;o)

11:57:20 AM