[OLR] Exercise 4.1 Blog or Wiki design

"You don't need an on-line community when most people are in the same geographical area, such as a building or a village and people are not so busy that meetings can be organised when most people can attend." OLR task

As a primary school teacher my community is in my classroom - in our classes shared conversations, in our shared learning experiences. In this sense the immediacy of face-to-face conversations is a great strength and the undertaking of these conversations supports us to develop as people that can talk and interact appropriately with each other. However online learning activities do give us some opportunities to explore ideas in ways that enhance our face-to-face experiences and which draw upon the strengths of blogs and wikis.

1. How would you design and manage content in a blog? Use your blog experiences so far.

To begin with I must be honest and say that I've always struggled to 'do blogs'. I'm kind of in awe of bloggers like Graham Wegner who have been at it for years and years without, seemingly, a break. Graham's blog gives good pointers about what to do with a blog:

1. Stay focused - Graham's been on about using IWB's for years. And when I looked at his site recently he's still focused on that idea. His core idea. I think an effective blog surrounds a core idea / purpose.
2. Be informed - as an ICT Coordinator Graham really does know his stuff: and not just technical stuff. He has a good handle on pedagogy and big picture and that comes out in his writing.
3. He links back selectively - Graham doesn't read and comment and respond to everyone - just a core group of co-respondents. It gives his blog focus and a sense of continuity. Graham doesn't try to address everything, just certain things that he's interested in.
4. Good use of categories - it's easy to pick up on a thread or an area of interest over time

So bearing all of this in mind, if I were to be a blogger I would aspire to Graham's way of doing things: Focused, informed, selective and organised. A blog can be an effective tool for capturing stream-of-consciousness thoughts. But too random an input will kill the blogging experience. Beyond this using effctive headings and organising 1 topic per entry is also key. A weakness, from a certain point of view, of blogs like Graham's, is that his entries have, over the years, become longer. This fairly reflects his, I guess, possibly increased writing to his community audience. But overall shorter is better for blogs I think. Although perhaps blogs are evolving into longer forms as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and the like fill the needs of short headlines and updates.

2. Select ONE blogging or wiki product, such as the one you use in this subject- eg Blogger. Write a 100-word summary of how it has supportive tools that are similar to the design advice in this topic. In your summary, consider how it satisfies the nine design requirements and the 3 underlying principles, suggested by Kim (2000a; 2000b)?

I'll look at wikispaces as a site. Over the years I've used it a bit for a range of projects. Most recently for a project in emt-501 in 2008. I think wikispaces offers a range of supportive tools that comply with the design advice in this topic. Specifically with respect to Kim's Nine Design Strategies:

1. Wiki's allow for clearly defined purpose-built communities with easy creation of all comer / private member only participation rules. Wikispaces makes it easy to allow people to form a group that fulfils an ongoing need. It's easy to include a Vision Statement - and it is also easy to support editing of that statement and discussion of that statement so that it might evolve (as communities can and do).
2. The groupware technology should make the establishment of the community easy: Wikispaces gets a big tick for this. Easy to set up accounts and create login rights for one's students.
3. There should be ways of defining the characteristics of participants. In LC_MOO we can "look" at a participant's description they define themselves. There are also extended profiles. Wikispaces provides support for photo avatars and for a member profile. Potentially this can be quite powerful because the member profile can be both what you choose to say about yourself, and it can also include links to all of the wiki's that you are involved in - this can tell quite a powerful story about who you / other people are.
4. Participants will take on various roles in the community. Newcomers' will need guidance; old-hands may give leadership. Wikispaces supports different levels of editing control. But this is fairly ad-hoc. Either you're an administrator or your not. It's not like a game where you can develop and attain greater powers.
5. Leaders need to be fostered. Discussion tabs can support this through background conversations.
6. Community rules and morés need to be developed. This would be up to - in my case - the teacher to set up and this would really be about the in class face-to-face establishment of expectations. Not such a strength of wikispaces I think.
7. Regular events help promote relationships. Unlike Facebook or Twitter (unless you're using the RSS feeds to draw people back) wikispaces is not particularly strong in this area. But that's consistent with a wiki being a place to go to perhaps. I'm not sure about this one.
8. Rituals help develop a mature online culture. Can't comment.
9. A large community can sustain sub-groups. Can't comment.
   
   

   
   

   In addition to this Wikispaces also related to these principles:

   • Design for growth and change. Wiki's have an organic sense to them - they (at least it seems to be to me) are created for a shared, communal purpose. All stakeholders can contribute to their development and therefore to the sites growth and change. Blogs seem rather more single handed - the author alone sets direction and chooses to (or not) respond to comments and conversations out in the blogosphere. As a commentator you either engage with the conversation or move on.
   • Create and maintain community feedback. Not so strong in a wiki as it is in a blog - where I think, arguably, feedback is king. Wiki's - being more collaborative are built on consensual feedback perhaps - but pages can be endlessly reviewed and reverted to by the administrator.
   • Allow your members to gradually take more control. A possibility with wikis - admins can hand over and pages can grow greatly through the contribution of interested stakeholders - on a wiki you only need to be able to edit (and be informed - or not) to take control.