Mathemagenic

This is not me, but another blog - Mathemathantic by Bill Dueber [via Serious Instructional Technology]

Mathemathanic means something totally opposite to Mathemagenic:

Richard Clark, coined the term twenty years ago as a play on words. From “thantos”, death, it’s used to describe an instructional intervention that makes you dumber than you were before.

It's nice to see new edublog, the name is funny, but I'm afraid that it will be too easy to confuse us...

Later: Because of this post Bill is thinking about changing his weblog title. I don't think that it's a good idea: that's true that people can be confused, but this is an opportunity for a story like the one Heiko Hebig and Haiko Hebig have :)))

Several related stories [via many in my news aggregator]

1. Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story:

Through a study of 45 blogosphere stories, Microdoc News has developed a picture of how a blogosphere story gets started, how that story develops and then how it then comes to an end. While each blogosphere story has its own pattern of development, the similarities between one story and another is intriguingly similar. The smallest blogosphere stories can have as few as fifteen bloggers, the average story has between 40 and 60 bloggers, while the largest one to date had about 285 bloggers involved. A blogosphere story can be as small as 180 posts in total, while the largest we studied has numbered 7,540 posts in total.

[see also Sylvie Noël on their research method and later Practical Considerations in Tracing a Blogosphere Story]

They describe stories as an interplay between four types of blog posts:

1. Lengthy opinion and molding of a topic around between three to fifteen links with one of those links the instigator of the story;
2. Vote post where the blogger agrees or disagrees with a post on another site;
3. Reaction post where a blogger provide her/his personal reaction to a single post on another site;
4. Summation post where the blogger provide a summary of various blogs and perspectives of where a blog story has got to by now.

blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation.

2. Googlewashed Revisited: Shape of a Blogologue provides an example of one story, discusses "multiple ends" of many stories and could be relations between mainstream media and blogoshpere. 

Should mainstream media understand how blogging works, and how collective journalism works, they should encourage their journalists to participate in building these collective stories, as when a journalist has participated in building a story in this manner, a more complete and authoritative article could be built with dozens of sources, votes, reactions and opinions are available through this process.

3. Discussion and citation in the blogoshpere by Tom Coates

This article provides good visiaul comparision of conversations in threaded discussions and weblogs. He also compares blogging conversations with Kuhn's paradigm shifts

[see also Tom's earlier post on How do we find information in the Blogosphere? and his later post on On parallels with academic citation networks]

4. Following a Collectively Constructed Blogstory traces and decomposed the discussion followed by the first article

At this moment I'll keep it as a collection of links, but I guess I'll be back to it one day.