home
intro
feeling the walls :
non-participation
blogging & lurking
learning styles
summary
| How I got started? | First I needed to spend some time feeling around the room that was: Blogs and Wikis. During this phase of the project I entered a couple of paragraphs in the wiki, otherwise all my contributions were to my blog. This was a stage of reading and learning during which I tried to work out what exactly blogs were and weren't and likewise for wikis. |
| How private are blogs? | Before I did the compare and contrast between blogs and wikis I spent a little time enquiring into the degree to which blogs are are 'private' [see: how can blogs be shared?]. I wanted to explore this question because I felt a blog could not be an exclusive oubliette of private reflection if it were open to viewing and commentary by visitors. The 'shareability' of blogs forms an overlap with a key feature of discussion boards - that of being public. Sharing a blog makes it public, and depending on how much it is shared it will offer varying degrees of interactivity to blog visitors. Later in my blog I reflected on my own experiences with blogs [see: the last 2 paragraphs of sowing the seeds]. I mention this here because they highlight how privacy (specifically perceived privacy) is important to bloggers and influences their blogging behaviours. |
| Why blogs are great? | The creation of lists of positive attributes for blogs and wikis was done next so that I could get a feel for why people might wish to use these technologies. It proved a useful exercise and demonstrated that there was a fair number of features in common to both. There is no doubt that blogs have wide appeal with one being created every seven-and-half seconds. I like blogs and the two features I like the most about them are that they are unmoderated, and that they are owned by the blogger. These things convey both safety (a safe place to write) and freedom to write in a style and subject matter of my own deciding [for more see: why blogs are great?]. |
| Why wikis are great? | Wikis by comparison focus on topics and not authors so the voice of the individual is muted and the emphasis is on the content. For this reason they prove excellent in building a concept of community, knowledge-sharing and trust - by virtue of being a collaborative writing tool [for more, see: why wikis are great?]. I didn't get first hand experience of the wiki other than posting up a few questions which were/weren't answered. A-M however enthused passionately about them and has used them for group project collaborations very successfully [see wiki: Why I love wikis]. |
| How are they used for learning? | I then moved on to see whether these qualities had been recognised by the online teaching and learning community, and if so, how? Strangely wikis don't appear to have been embraced in the way I had expected they might be. I'd have thought that the knowledge-sharing virtue would make it a highly attractive technology. I didn't however have time in this project to pursue why this might not be the case [see: using wikis for learning]. I'd hazard a guess that the world-writeable capability poses security risks for HE computing services? I did however find a few nice examples of how blogs are used in teaching and learning [see:using blogs for learning?]. They'd been used creatively by tutors to make course-related announcements, for facilitating short, subject-specific discussions, and as a group blog for student support. |
| A nice point: | "Blogs and wikis are a reinvention of the open publishing
philosophy of the web." [see: open
publishing on the web]. This is a nice point to close with as it highlights a common feature of blogs and wikis - the fact that the content of neither technology is overseen by administrators, meaning a blogger or wiki user can enter whatever content they please. They afford an autonomy unique amongst learning technologies. |
| next: non-participation |