Shifts in the power structure of the conference. Who are the members expecting to have power? When do they take power? When do they have power passed to them? When is power forced upon them? How does this happen? Why does it happen?
Blogs can also be used to analyse data by making use of the ‘Categories’ function
Nigel Robson in AACS cloned our group blog for us
We now have 29 blog categories
http://conclave.open.ac.uk/iet-students-analysis/
(categories are shown on the right).
Blog management tools provide an overview of these.
Blogs can be used as data.
Anesa, Gill and I are studying our own blog and our group blog
Gill is collecting data on informal mobile learning http://conclave.open.ac.uk/naturetrailblog/
This can be contrasted with the data collected in a wiki http://schome.open.ac.uk/wikiworks/index.php/The_Open_University_Nature_Trail
woodleywise, originally uploaded by ebbsgrove.
IET bloggers include Alan (above, if you couldn’t guess)
Anesa
Gill
Juliette
Patrick
Steve
Is this a virtual community of practice?
Group blog functions as a group memory.
Our top five this year (two tied for fifth place):
Making use of the comment function and the emoticons.
Group blog in action http://conclave.open.ac.uk/iet-students/?p=75
Using the blog as a research journal.
Over 30 different uses.
My top five:
Blogs are searchable by word and date.
They are accessible via any Internet-linked computer or via PDA.
You don’t have to put your rss feeds into a blog.
These RSS feeds are on my netvibes page http://www.netvibes.com/
Lots of connections to people in IET: Gill, Anesa, Juliette, Alan…
Blogs can take the form of an online diary or journal.
Or they can be composed almost entirely of RSS feeds
