Thursday, April 08, 2004
tech ronin: Academic Blogging is a Must
Useful piece on why blogging is a useful academic tool (summary - it creates a community, develops ideas and gets you out there). Within the comments is an interesting academic course that uses blogging as both a teaching and learning tool, in a similar (but more involved) way to the approach that we used. In our course, Peter and I blogged about HCI issues of relevance, providing a current, fresh view of how to think about HCI and design and usability issues. Students had a discussion area for their discussions which sometimes developed from the blog topics and sometimes went in otehr directions. This is slightly easier to manage as the communities are clearer - but the combined approach may be more inclusive for students. However, check out the number of students - much smaller than the 180 we have!
However, this gives me some decent ideas for teaching to the MSc course next year - and since we need comments, we'll have to set up a MoveableType system not a blogger one..... Comments work fine for internal communities, where access can be somewhat controlled and where spam, flame and abuse is much less likely to occur. For more public blogs, I'm still not sure of their value. Getting comments on your postings is great, and users are far more likely to respond straight away than even switching to email, but the downsides are great.
Useful piece on why blogging is a useful academic tool (summary - it creates a community, develops ideas and gets you out there). Within the comments is an interesting academic course that uses blogging as both a teaching and learning tool, in a similar (but more involved) way to the approach that we used. In our course, Peter and I blogged about HCI issues of relevance, providing a current, fresh view of how to think about HCI and design and usability issues. Students had a discussion area for their discussions which sometimes developed from the blog topics and sometimes went in otehr directions. This is slightly easier to manage as the communities are clearer - but the combined approach may be more inclusive for students. However, check out the number of students - much smaller than the 180 we have!
However, this gives me some decent ideas for teaching to the MSc course next year - and since we need comments, we'll have to set up a MoveableType system not a blogger one..... Comments work fine for internal communities, where access can be somewhat controlled and where spam, flame and abuse is much less likely to occur. For more public blogs, I'm still not sure of their value. Getting comments on your postings is great, and users are far more likely to respond straight away than even switching to email, but the downsides are great.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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