Networking and Collaboration in Blogs

A tool is only as good as the user...
As I become more comfortable with blogging and learn more about it's technological capabilities, the more blogging appeals to me for networking and collaboration. I am at the stage now where I can confidently instruct learners about blogging. I can see where a blog would be the most appropriate tool for various learning tasks and how this can be placed within learning design.

Being able to read the posts of others is where I learn most I think. I prefer social learning to other forms. Suggested tools, websites and other learning objects placed in blogs sends me on learning adventures - at my own pace. It is thought provoking to reflect on someone's opinion/situation/actions in their blog entry and compare their ideas to my own . This tends to result in changes to my knowledge base - the whole point of socially constructed learning! An example of this is advice from Kylie, " I was relieved that Authorstream maintains the multimedia and interactivity features of PowerPoint so that it is possible to embed these presentations without losing these features". This means I don't have to worry about features being lost with embedding as I have learnt by reading another's blog it won't be a problem.

Although my blog is only viewed by a few it meets my need as a place to think reflectively and clarify my thinking. My RSS feed alerts me to some great blog posts by others. For example today Silvia Tolisano has a postAnd you thought it could not be done - blogging in maths. I have sent this link to a peer I observed teach an online numeracy class last week, thought she might be interested.

When I read blog entries by people not in my field of work I sometimes struggle to understand their thinking because I have little background knowledge of their work environment and content. This does however ever broaden my thinking which is a good way to avoid becoming too insular in my chosen field. An example of this was reading a young doctor's blog. The work language was foreign to me but the social/people issues not so unfamiliar therefore reading his blog was a valid learning experience for me.

I agree with Suzy's mention of the amount of time required to investigate and play with the various technologies being significant. I found this a bit of an obstacle because of work and family commitments. My understanding of some tools was quite superficial although the tasks raised my awareness of the affordances of many spaces and digital media. Greater use of digital spaces and artefacts to better cater for authentic, problem based, collaborative learning (as opposed outdated pen and paper methods) is warranted. The use of Blogger in this course has met the requirements of 21st learning for me.