140 characters

This week I was in a meeting where a colleague said ‘If a post can’t be written in 140 characters it’s not worth writing’  or words to that effect. It might have been ‘not worth reading’. Shock horror! Where does this leave a slow, slow blogger, a person who always has to pause before thinking, a [...]

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CCK08 Research Papers

We – Sui Fai John Mak, Roy Williams and I - have finally completed work on 2 research papers following our participation in CCK08.

Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC
The ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC

On November 13th we will submit these papers to the Networked Learning Conference Steering Committee [...]

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Blogs: Resonance and online relations

Lilia Efimova on her blog – http://blog.mathemagenic.com/ - seems also to be asking questions about how and why some relationships can be formed, developed and sustained in  blogs. She asks the question: What exactly helps to establish and maintain personal relations via blogging? and suggests that one answer to this question might be in the frequency [...]

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Resonance in blogging

This idea – raised in our research team – has grabbed my attention. Why is it that when communicating online we are immediately drawn to certain people’s posts/blogs and not to others? We resonate with certain people and ideas and not with others,  just as I was immediately attracted to the idea of resonance in [...]

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Research is scary!

We have launched our CCK08 survey today. Did you blog or post to the moodle forums, or both, or neither during the CCK08 course?
It seemed to us that there must be very few courses that offer participants the choice of where they want to communicate, and that it would be interesting, if not important, to investigate [...]

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Jack of all trades and master of…..

Today I have worked on so many different things. It is a Sunday, but the weather has been foul – so it’s not been a problem to be not very far from my computer for the whole day.
I started the day checking on my blog and other feeds and whether any of the participants on the [...]

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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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