Facilitating Online/Looking for online community: Blog networks


 * A blogging network is what we are building in this course. We each have a blog, we each should be monitoring each other's progress through an RSS newsreader, and we should be commenting and cross referencing each other's posts from time to time. Hopefully by now, we ARE doing all this and are starting to see how a blogging network can function, but ours is a small and time dependent network. Real blogging networks develop over longer periods of time and include strong and weak connections between people, and a much more diverse range of topics.

To do

1. Look at the Wikipedia entry for Blogosphere and pay particular attention to the See Also section. Read up on one of the listed blogospheres in that section and write a post to your blog that explains in your own words what a Blogging Network is and can be - cite examples.

2. Make contact with a member of a blogging network you have identified and interview them for comments and ideas on how they think their blogging network could benefit from facilitation services. It might be they'd appreciate a chance to conference with each other on a particular topic, they might like to meet each other in person, etc.

3. Some of you will be contacted to present in this topic's meeting (TBA)

Extra resources
 * Blogging - Not ‘IF’ but When and Where. UPEI presentation | Dave’s Educational Blog - Blogging, like ‘academic writing’ is a vague label that really doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the subject it is meant to cover. Blogging is appropriate any time that people need to be kept ‘up to date’ with a topic, a person, images,
 * Radio New Zealand audio recording: Focus on Politics for 16 May 2008 - Life's a blog. Kate Williamson looks at how the Internet is being used to campaign in election year. File Size:6MB
 * Classrooms as Third Places CC By Konrad Glogowski with audio recorded presentation and discussion around Konrad's research in developing a community or writers through blogging.
 * Blogosphere - Wikipedia, July 2008
 * Introduction to Blogging - part of the excellent Wordpress Codex
 * Into the Blogosphere - a series of papers and articles on blogging
 * Educational Blogging Stephen Downes 2004 paper on blogging