Seb points to an interesting post by Phillip Windley regarding Web logs as conversation. It pretty well echoes my experience and feeling of how these things work. While some would encourage more responses on other people’s sites, I feel more comfortable doing what I’m doing now, bringing the post back here and commenting. Phillip says:
Viewing weblogs as part of a two-way conversation takes some effort. In an email conversation, a chat, a mailing list, or a newsgroup, there is a threaded discussion happening. You see the conversation happening sequentially like you were watching a dialogue between two people. Not so with weblogs…
Conversations, important ones, happen on weblogs all the time. People feel remarkably empowered by their ability to control the editorial policy and speak in their own voice. This is an excellent example of a keyword I think describes an exciting trend in computing: decentralization.
Another term that has been used in conjunction with decentralization is “loosely coupled.” What sets weblogs apart from other ways of having a conversation is this loose coupling. Other conversational forms are tightly coupled by the explicit threading that is part and parcel of their very design. As we’ve discovered, weblogs lack this explicit threading. This makes them better for some things, and not as good at others. Weblogs would be a poor tool for quickly reaching a consensus on a meeting time for a large group, for example, unless someone in the group has dictatorial powers. They’re a great way, on the other hand, to share institutional knowledge.
Weblogs are a effective method for members of an organization to narrate their work, keep track of things they think are important, annotate links to important information, informally describe project plans, and understand what others in their group are working on. I think weblogs could be particularly effective in education as a way for teachers to share primary sources of information with their students, model good writing, and provide deeper commentary on issues being studied. Likewise, weblogs in student hands provide students with a place to practice their writing skills, try on new ideas for size before committing to them, and get a sense of what their peers are thinking on an issue.
Seb puts it this way:
I can only report a strong personal reluctance to distribute my comments and (possible) insights over a large number of Weblog comment spaces. I want to reach out, read your stuff, carry it with me, digest it, and then use my own writing space to contextualize it in a personally meaningful way.
That’s the way I feel, too. Just as with this post, my biggest pull when reading other people’s content is to contextualize it to my own experience. I think that’s only natural. Yes, there are times when I feel compelled to add a comment to someone’s Web log, but most often I bring it back here. This is my ongoing conversation primarily with myself as I go through the portfolio process of collecting information, selecting what I find most relevant, and then reflecting on it in terms of how it fits with my life view. That reflecting is where much of my learning takes place, on the fly, and I want to track and document that here, not in someone else’s space. It does make the “conversation” more difficult in that the threads go all over the place (which is one of the reasons Trackback is so intriguing.) But to me, that’s what the power of Web logs is really about. It is publishing, yes, but it’s more a learning log.
In that same vein, I find myself getting in the habit of doing a regular review of my posts, just reading back and seeing what sticks out. And if I’ve found one major weakness in my Web logging efforts, it is in the area of information recall. Searching is only so good, and I know that I need to learn and do much more in the way of data and metadata and mining the information I include here.
As Seb says:
After all, not many people are really good at reflecting upon processes that span longer periods of time in completely unaided manner. We can only pay attention to limited number of experiential items at a given point in time, and working solely on the basis of material that we retrieve from memory is not the best strategy either, as psychologists have documented in countless studies.
What I hope my students get out of this more than anything is the opportunity to learn real reflection on a body of work that in it’s prior form was too bulky and too wieldy to look at effectively (unless they happened to be extremely organized.) Of course, that’s my biggest job, to teach them how to reflect and to show them the value of doing so.
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