Blogs and Communities
Tuesday and Wednesday night I'll be closing myself into a little room with a camera and high speed line to take part in two video conferences with colleagues scattered across Australia.
Having been on the road, I'm a bit behind on my preparation to deliver this:More and more distributed online learning groups and communities are adopting blogs as their community platform - intentionally and sometimes by chance. Some efforts are structured and others are ad hoc formations that emerge "between" a number of blogs.
But what kismet. As you might have read from an earlier post, Lilia is at my house. And she has written some brilliant stuff on blogs and community.
* What are these communities discovering?
* How does the blog interface differ from email lists and web forums and with what implications?
* What are the pros and cons of using blog technology for learning communities?
* What is the community perspective of blogs?
Right there. That's the story. Lilia would not be in my house if blogs did not facilitate connections between people with some little shard of shared interest. And Lilia would not be in my house if I did not feel she was a part of my community, not just a casual connection made online. Some kind of wonderful.
What are your key experiences or thoughts about blog communities and blogging and community? I'm particularly interested in points around learning communities. community_indicators
posted by Nancy White at 11:12 AM
2 Comments:
Bog communities are different, distributed and diffuse. The idea that connection happens in the spaces between blogs is enticing and difficult.
No real shared space, weak ties, tenuous links, tacit bonds - yet I too can attest, it works.
The connection of shared interests, the promise of emergent learning and the potential of back-channel communication, make this a strange and exciting field.
I agree. Blog communities are different. There's certainly some fertile research that can be done into community formation in blogs. The sense of community in blogs is quite different than you get with e-mail and newsgroups. I believe a lot of the community definitions we have seen earlier with web communities, do not apply with blogs because you have many many people who just read blogs but don't really post.
Our research group is looking into blogs and communities. Check out our blog for some discussion on this topic.
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