The e-learning Post provides a link on August 6 to interesting thoughts from Louis Rosenfeld, an independent information architecture consultant, on student learning in the blogosphere. Louis argues that tools that allow students to monitor their “egoboo” are a must for learning along with the tools that allow for content publishing. This is similar to observations from Kathleen Gilroy on her experiences with the use of blogs for e-learning.
Highlights of what Louis writes include:
“Had an interesting breakfast discussion yesterday with Bud Gibson, a professor at the University of Michigan business school. Bud is developing a collection of student blogs (or "blogosphere") as the infrastructure and publishing medium for an upcoming course.
But the "real" blogosphere--the one we're using to interact as you read this--isn't just blogs. In addition to tools that help us say stuff (e.g., blogs), there are tools that help us find other people's stuff (e.g., aggregators like Bloglines) and, perhaps most compelling, tools that help us find out what other people are saying about our own stuff (e.g., Technorati). If a student blogosphere included similar "add-on" tools, students might constantly monitor their content's "performance" just as we all obsessively do in the open blogosphere (and hey, come on, I'm sure I'm not the only one).
Understanding how one's content performed in a competitive, if local, information marketplace would surely be quite instructive. Through trial, error, and emulating others' successes, students would learn to write more effectively for the medium, which meets one of Bud's original goals. And students would arrive at their own understanding of the blogosphere as not just a collection of tools and content, but a fuller information ecology, complete with rules, incentives and disincentives, social agreements, boundaries, and metrics to help make sense of it all.”
I think that Louis and Bud are touching one of the main advantages of blogs for learning. This is not about vanity. It is actually the opposite, it is about learning what others think about our work and being able to modify what we do to make it more accessible and useful to others. Traditional e-learning does not allow for this sophisticated feedback.
Blogs devoted to learning and blogs, in general, would benefit from even more sophisticated feedback tools so we could all learn from others. However, what we have now with tools like Technorati, FeedBurner, and Feedster are light years ahead of traditional e-learning.
Lou co-authored with Peter Morville the book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly, 1998; second edition, 2002), Amazon.com's "Best Internet Book of 1998. His blog looks great.
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