hello Jon,

AU Landing is a great central spot for students to blog, share ideas, and form connections with one another and their instructors. It is intended as a learning space, and I for one do not blog to socialize with others. I blog as an autonomous learner, which means that I am pleased when someone responds back and offers feedback, but the absence of comments does not de-motivate me.

I give my posts freely for others to review, comment on, or ignore. I post primarily to meet my own needs, and enjoy making a contribution in some small way to learning in others. I suppose posting contributes to the formation of ideas, to the advancing of social capital, in some respects.

It is my intuition that blogging cannot entirely thrive unless it is freed from the constraints of cohort-based blogging, in which a class blog (and thus the instructor's control over that blog)dominates the blogging structure.

In this eco-system, students interact via the group blog, and managed by the instructor.  Every student has their own blog, and they are expected to post ideas, and comment on the posts of other students, but the activity is directed by the instructor. This eco-system encourages the students to use a tentative, wait-and-see strategy. They are more concerned with showing weakness, making mistakes, being singled out, than in being creative. This is a conservative system, in which the students are risk-aversive, so that blogging is done in a shallow, detached manner. Students do not own these posts, because they are mostly completed according to the instructor's cues. Students are more concerned about meeting deadlines and getting grades and mirroring the instructor's expectations, than in using the blogging tool and building their own ideas.

My own blogging began to thrive almost from teh first week once I engaged in dialogue with another learner, JoAnn Meiers-Hammond, and I did not begin to "own" my ideas as an independent thinker really until my first independent seminar. I really did not deliberately start engaging other learners from other courses I was not enrolled in till I took my second independent course. I blogged as an independent student, working on my own ideas, and contributing to the conversations of others. I did not discuss course-related topics; instead, I offered resources, I shared my experiences, and I responded to posts of a non-course-related nature, and broadened the discussions for these students to include other ideas not covered in the course. I acted as an informal mentor for other learners.

Hi Glenn

Thanks for the comment!

I think the point that this system is part of several others is a very good one. We cannot consider any computer system like this separately from the contexts and processes that surround it and determine its use. In that sense, how it is marketed and its role in the institutional context are just as important when we are thinking about design as how it is programmed, how we shape the interface, what functions we allow it to perform. To an extent this is true of any multi-user computer system but, where there is such a strong contribution to the shape and form of the environment from its users, if we shape what they do via external stimuli then it is very similar in effect to hard coding such things into the system. And then there are the knock-on effects that follow from the system's interaction design, that tend to polarise such tendencies through social navigation processes, magnifying small tendencies until they become large effects.

I think there's a place for both the managed and the unmanaged elements. While I generally dislike the use of grades and deadlines as motivators, I accept that they have their place in this kind of environment because of the nature of the overall system and I'm happy to accommodate them. What we somehow need to avoid is allowing those stalinist tendencies to lead the system into stagnation, and therein lies the problem.  People like you, who see the benefits and reap the rewards of the system are one of the ways we can drive a richer melange. Imaginative approaches to encouraging use of the system for its own sake, not (just) for marks are another. Similarly, encouraging a range of different uses and supporting different needs can help avoid the polarisation of the system. And system design which actively limits rampant rich-get-richer effects is also important.

What I believe that we need to cultivate and valorise is diversity, while at the same time avoiding confusion and chaos. It's a bit of a tightrope!

J