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Class Weblogs Anlysis and Reflection

March 9, 2005 By Will Richardson

Bud Gibson at Michigan State pointed me to his analysis of Weblog use in his classes last fall and it has some interesting insights into the dynamics of a blog classroom. What I like is that he shares the struggles and the solutions out in the open so we can all learn from his experience. Here’s a snippet:

By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students…

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution.

Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

Bud says that an analysis of student surveys about the class is upcoming.

Filed Under: General, Weblog Theory

Comments

  1. Bud Gibson says

    March 9, 2005 at 3:54 am

    Hi Will:

    Thanks for the note. One quick correction, I did this at University of Michigan, not Michigan State.

    People who read my post in depth point and are interested in the choice of platform point to this part. Perhaps I should have put it more up front.

    Bud

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