Having spent so much time thinking about & arguing for the use of blogs in eduction... figured it was about time I got myself one and started playing with the idea a bit more.
For the moment I'm just going to post thoughts about how you can use blogs in various different educational contexts, mainly tertiary & ESL. Then we'll see how it goes!
First up, I've been thinking about community and am reading a most excellent article picked up on distance-educator this morning: "Insights into the Nature of online community" Got me thinking whether Learning & Content Management Ststems (LCMSs) are in fact communities after all or just conversations... I mean, you can subscribe 'people' to an LCMS but that's just giving that person a right to join in... they're not even there!
Some mailing lists I've been on seem to try to compensate through introductions or just by asking mailers to specify where they're writing from but tat just doesn't seem to compensate. It's also pretty tricky and sometimes downright difficult to discuss or relate to people whop you just don't know... can cause a lot of friction & misinterpretation too!
So, how do we get round this? A community is made up of people, right, the article linked to above stresses the importance of meeting face-to-face and discussion boards & 100wd personal profiles just don't do that!
But a blog can!
So, my contention is that what communities are missing, what they need and what could eventually make this socially-constructed elearning thing into a reality is LCMSs that operate as hubs & sharepoints for individuals (who all maintain blogs). Something, perhaps, like this:
(drawn up in 5 minutes!)
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120501/images/blog%20community.jpg
10:47:24 AM 
|
