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?