blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for Online communities
February 13, 2007 at 12:49 am · Filed under Online communities, TheWeb, trends, web2.0
I think I blogged about this paper on participatory culture earlier. And I just commented on a discussion about crud and not crud. From an equity, social justice standpoint, yes I want everyone to participate, create, feel empowered. And I’m concerned about the gap in participation.
But from a philosophical, political and educative point of reference, it seems to be just another episode in the American Dream show of celebrity and spectacle. Anyone who has achieved anything has had to buy into the notion of quality, of good, better, best and crud. Dewey, Delpit, Socrates all advance both participation and expertise.
I don’t have a problem with crud, as long as I’m allowed to call it that without being ostracized as an elitist. I’m certain there were artists as brilliant as Picasso at the time, who..well…didn’t get a break. I should be able to feel ethical about appreciating expertise, particularly because I do articulate an understanding of how sociocultural context allows certain kinds of expertise over others. Naming crud has to be a part of that discourse, otherwise I’ve abandoned it.
May 14, 2006 at 11:11 pm · Filed under Online communities, educational technology, social computing, web2.0
This Educause article by Bryan Alexander entitled Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? gets me to thinking. It’s the question mark really. I’m wondering too what to make of all this. And diving in myself hasn’t yet given me much clarity. Maybe it’s because of that hammer looking for a nail thing: Here are all these cool tools, now let’s find a situation to use them in.
But what’s driving us old folk to hang out on this edge? My initial and continuing interest lies in distributed learning/distance learning.
I have no doubt that it’s an approach to learning that meets real needs and solves real problems. And so maybe my thinking should drift back in that direction. And I should follow up on that previous post about transactional distance and its relevance to Web2 and social computing. In this post where I connected up with a distributed conversation on online communities, I got a taste of something very interesting–a conversation that transcended location and to a certain extent time.
In a paper about informal learning, Smith suggests that informal education (not learning) is driven by conversations not curriculum. Education he argues intends to foster environments that produce learning.
To that end, isn’t the edublogosphere and the distributed conversations it generates informal distributed education?
April 14, 2006 at 7:45 pm · Filed under Community, Online communities, social computing, web2.0
CogDog and others had some interesting thoughts on online-community building. It got me to thinkin’ and to add a bit too. In the process I started reflecting about this community, the blogosphere, I’m now hoping to actively enter. So to continue with my thoughts…. I did a lit review 2 years ago on social presence in online courses. My position was that the term “lurker” suggests a negative or unwanted behavior and that there may be both social/personal benefits and positive learning outcomes associated with this kind of engagement. There’s more to this of course, particularly in crosscultural settings where learners’ language skills vary. The underlying assumptions are based in Bandura’s social learning theory and a western orientation to social presence.
So I got to thinking about the blogosphere, what a blog is and how we use them. Does the term “lurker” apply? Or is it outdated or not relevant? Do tools like trackingback, counters, technocrati facilitate another kind of social presense? In an online course, communicating via talking/posting is perceived to build social capital, how is that different in the blogosphere?
