State of the Blogosphere / 2008

[Skip Zilla]

Technorati presented a series of five articles titled State of the Blogosphere / 2008 which may be useful as a backgrounder to blogging and its place in contemporary cultural life. To what degree will blogging become the universally preferred way for students and teachers to express their ideas and discoveries with one another?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Skip! As you know, I am eternally optimistic about blogging. In the Ning for my classes, I actually use blogs only, and not discussions, since I love the sense of accumulation and accomplishment that students can feel about their blogs, which is less likely in a discussion - and a discussion board, like a classroom, often tends to be dominated by a few people, while when every single person in a class is blogging, that means every voice is resounding (so to speak!).

Yet I am discouraged by two things in particular:

1) Course management systems have failed to embrace blogging and are still heavily (HEAVILY) oriented towards discussion boards. The blogging tool in the course management system used at my university is so inadequate as to be useless, meaning that few faculty are going to have their students blogging, as this means using a tool outside of the course management system (VERY interesting take on all of that at the Chronicle for Higher Education the other day).

2) The bad press that blogging gets in general - all the mockery and disdain, etc. Admittedly, Technorati and services like it have been part of the problem, with unworkable and often frivolous measures of success and, even worse, what they call authority.

For me, blogs are a tool, an invaluable tool that has changed my life as a writer. I am so hopeful that it can be a valuable tool that will change my students' lives as writers, too!

As part of my New Year's Resolutions (I always make bunches of them, ha ha), I am playing around with "micro-blogging" using Twitter. Since I have thousands (and thousands and thousands) of Latin proverbs lying around, I am sending out Latin proverbs while I am online. Who knows... it's a weird little micro-blogging experiment, but I'll see if I cannot get it to catch on with other people as crazy about Latin proverbs as myself. ... IS THERE anyone as crazy about Latin proverbs as myself??? Well, I'll find out this way, ha ha.

Aesopus Twitter (a.k.a. Proverbiis Pipilo)

:-)

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks for the opportunity to dream a bit, Skip!
I'm a forum man, myself. I think the three facilities, wikis, blogs and fora, should become a major feature of human discovery reports - and it provide the opportunity for virtualising much 'school' - I can envisage (barely) formal education largely moving out of its buildings, or planting work annexes around library and laboratory space.
Ater all, when do we need to be physically face to face? Well, it may be at school inauguration and class conference time, it may be at graduation, it may be that we need to convene for a special guest/purpose. It may be that a group needs to meet with an instructor for some experimental investigations, or some practical skilling, some studio work or some fabrication workshop space. (I can't think of a sillier sight that a classroom of students gathered in one location at one time to build a wiki, post a blog, or contribute to a forum.)

Class conference time, Ian? Yes - a space or spaces of time during the year for various projects to be presented , promoted, discussed in full visceral, biological, spatio-temporal reality.

I don't see - other than the controls of required attendance - so many needs for 9 to 3 class. Of course, the bean counters, once they rearrange the idea of attendance recording to "presence hours", will vitiate the idea by thinking that one person can now resource several classes of a hundred on-line.