Jess’ E-Learning Blog

While weblogs have their merits, nothing is without its faults and just like everything else, weblogs are not any form of panacea. The factor that distinguishes blogs from other learning frameworks in my mind, the idea that the learner is also the teacher - the cyclical nature of reading someone’s learning, learning from it and making an opportunity for someone else to learn by posting it to the Internet - is both its greatest benefit and challenge.

When the learner is also the teacher, when students learn from each other, they review and recreate each other’s learning. One original post can spawn a swarm of comments, listed both on the postee’s page, but also the commenters’ pages. This creates an immense amount of data that third parties must sift through. While this wealth of knowledge can be enlightening, if the third party is searching for a single, specific piece of information, there is no benefit in spending a large amount of time wading through the excess information.

With linking, mixing and remixing of issues and blogs, inherent in the very nature of the weblog, is it not entirely possible that this excess of information can overwhelm the individual?

Through multiple linkages and connections are weblogs eventually going to tie themslves up in an enormous, unyielding knot of crossed wires? That pulling at one piece of wire will cause six or seven other identical pieces to fall and bury the searcher?

If, according to Rebecca, blogging barely existed in 1998 and by 2000 it had already grown to “thousands of weblogs: topic-oriented weblogs, alternate viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected in mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas” (para. 25) then what is the number today?

Where is the line labelled Too Much Information?

My experiences with blogging to date follow along the path of ‘heard of it, don’t want to try it’. My first understanding of the nature of a blog was formed merely from exposure from friends and the Internet. Therefore, the first thing I knew about a blog was that it was an online version of a journal or diary. Which brings me to the ‘don’t want to try it’ part of my original attitude to blogging. Why would I wan’t to publish my personal life on the Internet so that just anyone could read them? It’s a privacy issue for me.

However, I believe that a blog created for the purposes of academic learning and reflection is effective, interesting and perhaps not so revealing of my personal life The ability to disseminate not just information or knowledge but also thoughts, debates and commentaries on them excites me. I can see a world of possibility for interaction and growth between individual learners.

The world of blogging is much larger and diverse than I originally thought. What I thought of as being the sum and whole of blogging is only a recent detachment of the weblog world. My realisation came from reading an entry in Rebecca Blood’s weblog and realising what I can and would be using my blog for.

Blogging includes, but is not the sum of the reflections on one’s experiences or learning. Blogging is an instrument of communication, growth and learning. Even reading a social blog, you learn about the blogger’s experiences, reflecting on your learning and growing as a result. The act of reading the blog in the first place is an act of communication, furthered when you post your findings to your blog for others to read.