http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/31870.html

Full story at: http://jondron.cofind.net:80/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1380

Via Stephen Downes, an interesting posting from Ruth Reynard in Campus Technology. The article explores potential abuses of blogs in education. It is very notable that the education referred to lies very firmly within the traditional institutional context. Most of her recommendations relate to fitting blogs with traditional institutional values and norms, including issues such as learning objectives, assessment and structured use of the environment.

Although blogs can be useful in such a setting, it seems to me that she has rather missed the point.

The remarkable value of blogs comes not from their support for annotated postings, but from their connections with each other. The blog is a fundamentally network-based environment that achieves meaning through being part of its piece of the blogosphere ecology. If we choose to constrain this then we are missing out on a wealth of connections, serendipitous encounters and new opportunities for learning that were simply not an option before this kind of technology came about.
Created:Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:51:57 GMT