EduBlogging Eco-Systems
This is a learning object prepared by Glenn Groulx about edublogging. It contains five rich pictures, a brief text description, and a 12 minute podcast.
Centralized edublogging systems occur when the main activity is taking place within the class blog, which is authored and maintained primarily by the instructor. The learners are dependent on the instructor for resources, suggestions, topics, and feedback on their posts to the class blog. Very little interaction occurs among learners, except as comments on others' posts as specifically requested by the instructor. Very little posting activity is occurring within individual students' blogs. The centralized blogging ecosystem is the most common form of system in place, often considered by the instructor as a replacement for regular forums, but allowing the potential for student-initiated discussions outside the class blog. Assessment of student posts is often done either by the instructor using rubrics, or by the student as a summative reflective post, or not at all.
Decentralized edublogging systems occur when the majority of the students' posting activity moves from the class blog to within individual blogs, with the instructor taking a more mentoring role offering resources, exemplars, and encouraging individual student bloggers to share their discoveries with their peers. There is a reciprocal exchange of experiences about how to find resources, and how to make use of them. Individual learners share their thoughts and ideas with other learners, making use of more than the class blog and the instructor for resources. Students share how to use RSS feeds, bookmarks, links to multimedia resources, journal articles, and interact more deeply with others by weaving others' ideas into their own posts.
Distributed edublogging systems occur when the students are capable of interacting across multiple blogging networks, utilizing the course as just one node of activity. The course-related posting activity is distributed across multiple blogs, where individual learners are all drawing from their own individual aggregations to process and share multiple sources such as Slide-Share, Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds, Delicious bookmarks, Tag Clouds, Google analytics log reports, posterous, etc. The posting activity becomes much more self-directed, rather than aimed primarily at other students and the course instructor. The instructor animates the blogging activities of the course participants, and models the aggregating activity for other co-learners to emulate and pass along to others, not just peers within the course, but to other students within the program, and other learners within other learning communities such as CIDER, CEET, SCOPE, etc.
