Category Archives: Blogging

H807: Luck and Laurence (8.12.05)

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I’ve been reading Luck and Laurence on videoconferencing. I now have to consider what they have to say about the innovative nature of elearning and the technologies used for elearning.

Before I get on to content, there’s also the issue of access to the material being innovative – it’s accessed and then discussed online.

I printed this article out and went to sit somewhere comfortable to read it. Then I found references to Figures 1-7, Exhibits 1-4 and Table 1. Where were they?

Back on the computer, sign in to Innovate again, find the article again. Hmm, they’re all hyperlinks. Start printing them out. Is it worth doing this? No. Go and look at every hyperlink individually. Yawn. One’s inaccessible because it’s a video stream.

And how is this looking at blogs going to work? Will they all be in the same place, or will students have to trawl around 10 or 15 different sites, looking at blogs?

Very interesting, this participant observation.

Border lines (17.11.05)

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Anesa’s thinking about where the borders of linear programming lie. I’m thinking about where the borders are on virtual communities.

A lot of people I read (I’m reading Gary Burnett on information exchange in virtual communites, at the moment) characterise a virtual community as what you see happening online. It’s the people posting and it’s what they post.

The community has a lot of subsets: newbies, who are just getting the hang of it; members, who have taken a recognised part in a sizeable and interesting thread, lurkers who are hidden away on the fringes.

However Katz (Luring the lurkers – archived on slashdot) argues that the online stuff is just the tip of the iceberg and that you don’t understand a virtual community at all if you only look at how it interacts in public.

For him, many lurkers are interested parties who are often willing and able to communicate on a one-to-one basis but are not happy with the risks and costraints of posting to the whole community. Katz’s piece may be grey literature but it’s a really useful view of lurking.

Katz also says that, while the public face of what happens in his blog is that there is an enormous amount of flaming in fact, hidden from the public gaze, is a huge amount of one-to-one supportive and helpful communication.

Ruth Brown (see below. (Must post more notes on her article.)) also looks at the extension of the community away from the public forum. For her, the top membership level of a virtual community are those people who are communicating away from the public forum – the ones who are emailing each other, ringing each other and meeting face to face.

Posting length (17.11.05)

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I’m thinking about the role of posting length in building a virtual community. I think that long postings put people off, because they look carefully constructed and full of information – they are more difficult to read and they are intimidating because they appear to show that the poster has thought about and knows about the subject.

Posting length is an interesting thing about blogging, because I tend to blog a couple of hundred words. If I want to see more I add another post. I know that’s not how all blogs work, but it works for me, and it makes my thoughts easier to review when I go back though my blog, as information and thoughts are split up.

Perhaps online tutors and experienced community members should model short, speech-like exchanges to encourage students to become involved in virtual communities.

If too many postings are too short, though, it also becomes a pain to read because it stretches endlessly down the page or you have to click to umpteen postings and they’re all fairly boring.

And what about thread length? If a thread is very short, that suggests it’s either new or it’s not very interesting. On the other hand, if a thread is very long it’s off-putting because there is just TOO MUCH INFORMATION. I’m in a virtual community that currently has a thread purposefuly set up to be the longest thread on the community. It’s all light-hearted and amusing and each individual part is easy to read, but 356 postings and counting? Puh-lease!

And what is the role of small talk in virtual learning communities? On the one hand it’s useful because it gets people talking, makes it easier and less threatening to post, promotes knowledge of members of the community. On the other hand, if you have limited time you want to cut to the chase – you don’t want endless discussion of the traffic on the M25 that morning, or of people whose budgie has just died.

Gill commented:
Although while I was doing the H80* online courses, the topic of cats was so popular I think we ended up with a discussion or conference dedicated almost entirely to it.

What does that say about us I wonder….

Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 18/11/05 09:36

Getting new members (9.11.05)

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It proves really complicated to get Anesa and Gill into my blog. This blog’s too private, and if I go via blogger.com that becomes too public.

I could pay for web hosting and host it myself, but that seems like a lot of money to do something that should be fairly simple.

Wonder if we could interest the OU in setting up a research blog site?

9.11.05 Anesa commented
Hi Rebecca … got in and read your entries so far … at least you have research question!!! Lot more than what I have at the moment :).

10.11.05 Gill commented
It did seem complicated, however in retrospect, we’ve achieved it in only 24 hours, and we weren’t trying for all of that time. I spent some time investigating a variety of PhP bulletin board type applications that I could host on my own website, but came to the conclusion that they were all too complicated for our needs.

10.6.05 Gill commented
I’ve just read Anesa’s comment (and marvelled at the fact that she can use her own name as a Screen Name whereas I’m obliged to go for some whacky pseudonym because there are a million other Gill Clough’s). And I thought I was unique.

I now realise that this is Rebecca’s own research blog, but reading Anesa’s comment about not having a firm research question resounded with me. Bearing in mind the success of these web-based forums that I’ve been researching in my investigations into informal learning using mobile devices, I suspect that a group blog would be helpful to us in a similar way. We could use it for bouncing ideas, for requests for help (like “How do I submit an expenses form” or “Anybody remember how to purchase non-elective software”). We would then have a written record that we could check back on.

I’m going to try to create a group blog for the three of us using this AOL messaging system. It might provide some interesting material for analysis. We could even present it somewhere – a group PhD blog from people doing dissimilar subjects must be of interest.

In the end, I simply signed myself up with AOL’s AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) to obtain what they call a “Screen name” and Rebecca added me to this blog. Anesa already had an online ID that was acceptable to AOL. Had I done that at the start, we’d have all been online within an hour.

Now…..what to do with our group blog …

Hmmmmm.