Blog aggregation

Did you follow the CCK08 course? You remember all that talking we did about how difficult it was to keep tabs on all the blogs you wanted to follow – well Nancy White (who I’m sure you’ll remember from the CCK08 course if you didn’t already know her from elsewhere) and Tony Karrer have obviously recognised [...]

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Blogs and forums again!

I have spent some time today thinking about this, reading and trying to ‘get a handle’ on the differences. Having written this I can also see that it would be good to ‘get a handle’ on the similarities but I haven’t done that yet.
Anyhow – here are my first thoughts, which I will continue to [...]

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Choosing to blog

Thanks to John and Matthias I am still thinking about if blogs might offer a distinctive type of conversation compared to other types of online communication and if so how are they distinctive?
A quick internet search has shown that people have been writing about reasons for blogging, and characteristics of bloggers for the past 5 years. [...]

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Teachers talk too much

The CCK08 round up was an interesting meeting. It seems like it was held at a difficult time for some and clashed with their teaching commitments, so a few familiar faces were not present.
There was quite a lot of talk about assessment. I think it will be worth listening to the recording again to capture [...]

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Is blog conversation distinctive?

There must have been some research done on this question.  I will have to dig around. I have started to think about this in response to ‘conversations’ with Mike and Lani on this blog and with John via a Skype call this morning.
Mike has commented that discussion is spread across blog comments, tweets, emails, f2f [...]

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What makes a post valuable?

This is a question that has been asked by Alice  MacGillivray in one of the CPsquare community forums and an interesting discussion is going on there. It seemed to me that this question is very relevant to recent discussions in some people’s blogs about reasons for blogging. Do discussions happen in blogs or is it a [...]

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‘Scratching your own itch’

This is a ‘Mike Bogle’ phrase which tripped off his tongue in his response to my last post. It was so great to receive Mike and Matthias‘ and Robin’s responses, which have stimulated my thinking and encouraged me to dig deeper into why I blog. It also encouraged me, Mike, to have a go at producing a [...]

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Reasons for blogging

I was interested in Mike’s  ten minute blog post about why he blogs. I can relate to a lot of what he has written. In particular I find these paragraphs describe exactly how I feel:
I blog because it helps me explore, self-assess,  reflect and document my current intellectual state.  This includes concepts I’m grappling with, [...]

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Establishing a Community Identity

In my last post I was thinking about some of the issues that surround the sustainability of a community. Thanks to Carmen, John and Keith for their thought-provoking comments. I am still thinking about these issues. I understand that communities need time to emerge and that a community culture is such that members are autonomous [...]

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Sustaining Communities

The subject of the research paper that I have recently submitted (with a colleague)  is the challenges facing ‘artificially’ created communities. By this we mean communities that are set up as  part of a funded project. We found that there are significant challenges, as you would expect,  to be faced when the funding ceases. The project [...]

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