Mathemagenic

Radio went off on Friday, so I couldn´t post. Will try to catch up tomorrow, happy that I have saved my notes on WBC...

Good news - extended abstract for I-KNOW04 has been accepted. See Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks (written with Sebastian Fiedler, Carla Verwijs and Andy Boyd). Reviewer comments:

The Idea of using weblogs as utility for knowledge "creation" is very interesting, cause it seems to be "unstructured" way of micro articles.

For me the fact of stealing as fruitful reuse is missing in the abstract, so I am looking forward for it in the full paper. (like Garvin cites Milliken: "stealing ideas shamelessly").

I am missing the fact of information overloading and what weblogs can do against this.

Maybe it is possible to insert a pro/cons of discussion boards versus weblogs, cause the discussion board technology is very spread in companies.

Another reviewer asks for empirical evidence... Comments are to the point and hope we can address them within the page limit we have :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Links for my presentation of Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks

• shortcut to this post - http://learningwebs.notlong.com
• weblogs: Lilia Efimova & Sebastian Fiedler
• paper & presentation slides

Creating on-line student communities using forum-supported institutionalised weblogs by Anil Pathak et al.

The authors use non-conventional definition of weblogs: based on "diary-like content" indeed of "diary-like format". They used Blackboard discussion board for student's "diary-like" postings. I don't think that this is substantially different from forum discussions. Still, the analysis done is interesting and worth looking at.

Analysis categories

• Discourse stage: norming – (no storming) - relationship building - collaborating
• Discourse moves: classification of weblog posts (adapted classification of weblogs by Ford (see the reference below) to classify posts) according to their use (e.g. lifelog describing experience, querylog - asking questions)

From findings

• correlation between stages and types of posts - would be interesting to see if it's replicated somewhere else
• no storming stage, no conflict and lack of disagreement - groupthink?

Reflecting on my problem with weblog definition used I'm thinking about distinguishing characteristics of weblogs. I guess the main on is personal: personal space, personal voice, independence. This is missing: as Anil explained you can get a "all postings by author" view there, but it's not used often and people tend not to come back to their earlier posts (may be the case with weblogs as well).

As promised: Ford, R. (2000). Save the robots: Cyber profiling and your so-called life. Stanford Law Review, 52(5), 1573-1585.

This post also appears on channel weblog research