[This post was in drafts for a while; posted on the actual date of the workshop, so the participants can find it.]

When I was asked to facilitate a discussion on reflective learning and weblogs at the workshop on Informal learning and the use of social software in veterinary medicine I hesitated: while reflective learning is part of my practice, at the moment I’m far from the theories about it or from facilitating reflective learning in educational settings. Well, at the end it worked – we didn’t go that far into the reflective learning itself, but talked about uses of weblogs for learning of students and practitioners.

A few things that might be useful for the participants and may be some other people.

Reflective learning: I googled for stuff to read on it to brush up my knowledge without getting to far into the theory and found this best practice paper useful – Learning journals and logs, reflective diaries

All kinds of things on blogging that I wrote for practitioners:

• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging – things to consider before starting blogging (what weblogs are good for and which challenges blogging brings)
• Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas
• Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments

• Survey on informal learning
• eLearning’s Next Chapter
• Learning webs: introducing weblogs to support communities

I think this is called karma – if you research other people via their weblogs someone will come to research you :)))

Adrian Miles gives his students an assignment to study people online – and I happened to be in the list. I’ve got email from one of the students who study me – being studied feels fun and strange…

And – I found the page where the results are being documented and weblogs of students who study me :) Wasn’t going to do that, but the email reminded me that I was far behind in reading Adrian’s blog, then I saw posts about the assignment and the rest was the result of curiosity and having some searching/browsing skills.

Now I’m a bit wondering if I spoil anything in Adrian’s plan by blogging it :) May be, but I’m trying to be a nice girl and do not add names and links. And – this is a good example of how things may be in the online space: you study bloggers, someone comes to study you and you may want to decide to study those who study you :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/20.html#a1554; comments are here.

• Blog as a nexus of multimembership and accidental brokering
• BlogWalk 2.0: personal Webpublishing for self-organized and informal learning
• Common visual design elements of weblogs

I mentioned Edublog Awards earlier, but thought it may be worth doing it again for two reasons:

1. Voting is open till 10 Decemeber and the categories are:

• Best Individual Blog
• Best overall group blog
• Best resource sharing blog
• Best Research Based Blog
• Best blogged paper(s)
• Best designed & most beautiful blog
• Best technology meets pedagogy blog
• Best use of weblogs within teaching and learning
• Best Newcomer (2004)
• Best Librarian Blog

2. My weblog is nominated as Best Individual Blog and Best Research Based Blog.

I’m encouraged to ask my readers to vote to make it fair, but I do not insist that you vote for me :) Many of the competitors are in my own reading list and do great work, so even if I don’t win it feels nice being in a good company…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/12/06.html#a1447; comments are here.

• Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: one page overview
• Links

At KM Europe John Seely Brown mentioned a workshop on weblogs at HICSS… I was wondering “what and when” for some time, but then discovered it clicking on a link that looked pretty innocent :)

HICSS-38: Socialware for Learning Environments (Tuesday morning, January 4, 2005):

Social software (socialware) enables users to collaboratively create and use information while also providing a community context. Socialware has been applied to learning environments for many years, predominantly through shared discussion forums/BBSs. Recently new socialware technologies have become available, notably weblogs and wikis. Their use is yet in the early stages, and has remained for the most part un-researched.

The goals of this workshop include: (1) introduce various social software tools, (2) provide examples of their use in the edu space, (3) discuss other possible applications, (4) outline a research agenda concerning how social software is used in academia, and (5) create connections for collaborative projects and studies.

Hope it doesn’t coincide with Persistent conversations minitrack I’ll be attenting (with conversational blogging paper), so I can be there… Going to find out more.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/23.html#a1440; comments are here.

• Blogs and teaching
• Trip report (1): blogs and wikis implemented
• Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs

Something I was going to add here for a long time – Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs, an online collection of essays edited by Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman.

Next to the great content it’s a good example of innovative academic publishing: peer-reviewed, online, with categories, comments and trackbacks for each essay, released under Creative Commons… It’s in my reading list (after I finish most important things in my writing list ;)

See also: review by Lanette Cadle in Computers and Composition Online (via Clancy Ratliff).

Table of contents:

Foreword. Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness by Kathleen Ethel Welch, University of Oklahoma

Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture by Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, University of Minnesota

Visual Blogs by Meredith Badger, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project by Anita Blanchard, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution by Christine Boese, Independent researcher

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs by Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe, North Dakota State University

Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere by Brian Carroll, Berry College

Promiscuous Fictions by Tyler Curtain, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration by Jason Gallo, Northwestern University

Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs by Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana University at Bloomington

The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature by Steve Himmer, Emerson College

Battlecat Then, Battlecat Now: Temporal Shifts, Hyperlinking and Database Subjectivities by Kylie Jarrett, University of South Australia

Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing by Graham Lampa, Hamline University

Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom by Charles Lowe, Purdue University, and Terra Williams, Arizona State University

Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog by Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd, North Carolina State University

Personal Publication and Public Attention by Torill Elvira Mortensen, Volda College

Weblogs and the Public Sphere by Andrew Ó Baoill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Geography of the Blogosphere: Representing the Culture, Ecology and Community of Weblogs by Nicholas Packwood, Wilfrid Laurier University

Parody Blogging and the Call of the Real by Trish Roberts-Miller, University of Texas at Austin

Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere by Frank Schaap, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School of Communications Research

Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs by Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright, Indiana University at Bloomington

Formation of Norms in a Blog Community by Carolyn Wei, University of Washington

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/09.html#a1337; comments are here.

• Blogs in reseach
• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 2 – blogging beyond webpublishing
• Weblog conversations are flows in a river delta

Ideas and presentations about implementations of weblogs and wikis from conferences I visited (see other themes). These are the highlights grouped in themes (relevant for our research); I’ll try to link to full sources as much as possible.

Weblog imlementations in corporate settings

Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing by Martin Röll at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation with notes, draft version of paper, wiki notes, Martin’s post
• conceptual ideas on connections between personal knowledge management and organisational KM; weblog in the context

Informal, joined up knowledge sharing using connected weblogs in pursuit of Mental Health service improvement by Lee Bryant at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes, post by Lee with summary and links to people who wrote about it
• bonus: Stephanie Booth and Lee on the “Lee Bryant notetaking experiment”
• case study: 18-month knowledge community development project with the National Institute for Mental Health in England
• best of all: full of ideas, tricks and lessons learnt!

Using Weblogs as Project Management Tools in innovative projects by Michael Schuster at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes
• case study: multi-author project weblog with students for real-life project => used as discussion board, not very interactive, topics not used

Enhancing Blogs with a dual interaction design by Brigitte Roemmer-Nossek at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, wiki notes
• case study: virtual communication among a class of trainees and among their coaches during on-the-job training
• results
  • coaches didn’t expept the tool (not many, mainly to communicate with trainees, but not between each other), trainees did
  • weblogs worked better than discussion forum and chat in two previous cases

Learning from weblogs of others (re: weblog apprenticeship)

Legitimised theft: Distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks, our own work, presented at I-KNOW KM/learning track

• paper, presentation
• conceptual framework, “public weblogs” case and possible limitations of implementing in companies

Using weblogs for eliciting new experiences and creating learning elements for experienced-based information systems by Gabriela Avram, Eric Ras, Stephan Weibelzahl, presented at I-KNOW KM/learning track

• Gabriela, is anything online?
• a case of weblog implementation in a company
• study of how weblog posts could be useful as resources for (more) formal learning programs => yes, they are useful

Collective blogging from the view of a context-oriented understanding of knowledge by Markus Glötzel at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, wiki notes
• a case of weblog implementation
• study of how people contextualise observations through blogging and what others can learn from it => weblogs allowed totally exterior person to construct narrative based on what information had been stored in the weblogs

Beyond webpublishing: a journey into reading… lurking… learning… – my presentation at EdMedia symposium on weblogs and learning

• presentation; no paper, but I’ll be writing on it coming months
• conceptual framework for analysing learning effects of weblog reading: weblog networks as social ecosystems as slides + lurking/legitimate peripheral participation + implicit learning

Weblogs in educational settings

Seeding conversational learning environments: Running a course on personal webpublishing and weblogs by Sebastian Fiedler at BlogTalk 2.0

• wiki notes
• related presentations at EdMedia symposium on weblogs and learning and I-Know/Hybrid learning track, but nothing is online (Sebastian?)

Don’t remember the title, but it was interesting by Adrian Miles at EdMedia symposium on weblogs and learning

• is anything online? I could find only general notes on symposium

Blogging as a dynamic, transformative medium in the writing classroom of an American Liberals Arts College by Barbara Ganley at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes, notes by Barbara (before the conference, most detailed)

Blogging in higher education: 10 thoughts/lessons by Tom de Bruyne at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes

Weblogs in journalism

Blog to work: blogging and journalism by Jane Perrone at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, wiki notes
• on experiences writing weblogs for Guardian Unlimited: personal blogging vs. blogging for work; role of weblogs in news coverage

From weblogs to wikis

Bottom up Knowledge Management with Weblogs and SnipSnap by Stephan J. Schmidt & Matthias L. Jugel

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes
• conceptual stuff on bottom-up KM
• use of SnipSnap (integrated weblog/wiki solution) in Fraunhofer (not much about it in the presentation, but I guess they will tell you stories if you ask :)

Roughing up processes the Wiki Way – Knowledge communities in the context of work and learning processes by Frank Fuchs-Kittowski, David Fuhr, André Köhler at I-KNOW KM/learning track

• hope presentation will be online soon
• one more case of wiki implementation in Fraunhofer, this time in connection with formal learning program

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk and weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/13.html#a1280; comments are here.

• BlogTalk: back home
• Blogademia – weblog research blog by Scott Nowson
• BlogTalks 2.0

[sent via e-mail on 24 June 2004]

My home PC is disconnected again, so I have no idea when I will be able to post. hopefully my friends can fix it before I’m back, otherwise I will be disconnected for two more weeks. Anyway, I need to get all these impressions out of my head.

Ed-Media has been a strange experience. The conference is huge – 1500 people – difficult to get an overview and to get around (also presentations are in two buildings with 10 min walk in between). The chances for serendipity should be good, but I really miss a cosy atmosphere and easy-to-establish-good-connections of smaller conferenced. But may be my reaction is due to the fact that it’s not on my core topic anymore.

Anyway, so far I had great experiences. Between others conversations with Adrian Miles and Jenny Preece. These two alone would make it worth travelling.

Hovewer the main reason for being here was a simposia on weblogs and learning that we have organised. We had a few things to work out as part of the people who were going to come couldn’t make it at the end. To be fair I was surprised: participants managed to survive three of us presenting in a row and stayed for a long discussion. We had an interested and responsive audience, so at the end the lack of presenters turned out to be a good thing: we had almost one hour for a discussion. I hope to post presentations once my connection gets better.

Strangely my energy level is so low now that I can’t even write a summary :) Mix of stress, impressions and hot weather, I guess.

Later: see notes by Adrian Miles

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/02.html#a1254; comments are here.

• WBC04: day 3 morning
• Digital portfolio day
• Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks

It didn’t take us long: BlogWalk 2.0, 28 May, Nürnberg, Germany, hometown of Sebastian Fiedler. This time the fun and conversations will be around the role of personal Webpublishing for self-organized and informal learning.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/22.html#a1178; comments are here.

• Blogs as a learning tool with group projects
• BlogWalk Amsterdam: Digital bohemians redefined
• Ed-Media…

In case you haven’t seen it yet: Alex Halavais for the chapter in International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, forthcoming from Kluwer.

• Part 1: Collaborative Web Publishing as a Technology and a Practice
• Part 2: Weblogs as “Replacement” Educational Technology
• Part 3: The Open Classroom
• Part 4: Trips without the field

Must read.

• Part 5: New apprenticeship
• Part 6: Timeless education

Update 16/04:

• Part 7: Some practical implementation issues

Update 19/04 (final part :)

• Collaborative web publishing in a democratic knowledge society

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/08.html#a1162; comments are here.

• Blogs and teaching
• Rethinking apprenticeship
• Socialware for learning environments at HICSS-38

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

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/27.html#a1143; comments are here.

• WBC04: day 1
• How blogging makes my life difficult
• Weblogs from a philosophical perspective