I've not yet, and may never do so, reach any conclusions about what I'm considering currently. The more I look at, and have experience of using or enhancing, weblogs the more educational potential I see in this genre. I'm certainly not going to put them forward (yet) as full-blown Learning Management Systems but as candidate engines for alternative and perhaps more satisfactory virtual learning environments? … probably yes. Weblogs (blogs) are web sites that are automatically archived, searchable, and time-stamped. The underlying blog server formats the content into headlines and articles/stories, with the user only needing to enter text and perhaps images.
I find a certain irony in the way that most vendors of mainstream proprietary learning environments appear to designate a minor supporting role to their 'Announcements' or 'Noticeboard' aspects of their offerings. As a result these tend to be minor stopping points on the way to the 'much more important' course material or content.
In the weblog, however, the announcements, articles, stories are the raison d'etre' so much so that, not satisfied to present articles from one source, the weblog has the temerity, due to the adoption of the RSS standard, to receive syndicated stories from other sources and, in turn, offer it's own portfolio of articles for use by others. For example, a blog supporting a programme or module could be the vehicle by which faculty post date and time-stamped short articles relevant to the course but which also link to related, but distributed, learning resources which are presented via RSS feeds. Such feeds can be static or dynamic so that updated RSS formatted information will be reflected in whatever application is displaying it, e.g. a la Auricle's RSS Dispenser.
Here then is the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system.
Blogs, and RSS in particular, exhibit a feature which is critical to future development of distributed systems, i.e. the ability to provide a unique address for an information or learning object; a point which has not gone unnoticed by some new actors in the knowledge management and portals sector, some who view existing systems as inflicting mortal wounds on knowledge capture and sharing.
“Portal and KM vendors could learn a few tricks from emerging technology segments like RSS, RDF, and the blogging community. These initiatives have stumbled upon [what I consider] the single most important aspect of network dynamics - the discrete addressability of information objects.”
http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/5936
“…e-mail is where knowledge goes to die … In most companies annotations and observations are typically created in e-mail with some messages containing links that point out to specific information objects relevant to the message. Aside from the message itself, the knowledge dies a slow death in the inbox of office workers and executives. Creating a process so that annotations and business observations may live as uniquely addressable information objects, clearly has greater advantages; especially for portal users.” (ibid)
I also kind of like the idea of the weblog as a disruptive technology which unexpectedly comes in from 'left field' and upsets the status quo.
“Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.”
Source: Christensen C (2003), The Innovator’s Dilemma, HarperBusiness) http://mysttechnology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/11678?model=user/mtp/web
So what's the catch? Let's take Auricle as an example.
Auricle is a blog with a restricted number of article authors but with commenting privileges open to all readers. I suspect that the Auricle model would be quite popular amongst certain faculty in my own institution, but I'm guarded about wide internal marketing of this approach. Why? It's got a fairly low barrier to entry and it's minimalistic interface doesn't eschew the provision of content, it just connects it to an article which sets the context for the content.
The main problems I foresee are related to user/group/cohort management and how well the model scales up to handle potentially hundreds of blogs and a multitude of authors. The collaborative weblog engine we use currently is pMachine (www.pmachine.com) which is absolutely fine for what Auricle is doing but we really need a locally controlled system which makes it really easy for faculty (or students) to set up and maintain their own collaborative weblog and populate it with users (authors and commentators) and syndicated feeds. Furthermore, like Auricle the basic site should be enhanceable so that other web applications, e.g. Poll, SoundBlox can be added easily. What is required here is an enhanced institutional version of the way online services like Blogger.com enable a user to create their own weblog.
If anyone can suggest a weblog engine or open source content management system which they feel is already up to the job please post a comment.
