Response to Bruce Spear - (as an aside - I just posted two other responses to specific replies to my original posting on learning and blogs but they seem to fall at the end of the entire thread rather that after the reply I was responding to as in a regular treaded discussion - not sure if I am just misuing the tool - but I will indicate who I am responding to, as I did on the one in future replies.) Bruce you raise an excellent point. I am new to blogs and started two recently as an experiment. They appear to hold great promise for a number of functions and are certainly easy to use. It seems that blogs, with their extensive search functions, are designed for more exposure and distribution than dialog which is consisitent with your point. While dialog is also enabled, the more public the web blog, the less likely that dialog will occur within the blog. In the case of my experiment, an unscientific sample of two by the same author, dialog has been generated but so far it has occurred more outside the blog than within it. Chat sessions with forums, were dialog is the first priority and broad exposure, an available, but secondary function, because of the more limited search, still seems to get better dialog going within it. But then I could easily be wrong here and it may just be that people are more used to chat than blogs for dialog or I am not yet fully using the medium to its advantage in my blogs. In one example on the effectiveness of blogs offered by Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group, it seems using web blog technology for a very focused target audience around a specific task, completing a course, combines the best of both. You are driving up usage because of the exposure features of the blog yet doing it in a traditional discussion group setting which is designed to encourage dialog between group members on a common task. I have used collaboration in learning in a number of situations prior to the introduction of blogs. They seem to hold promise for this but we will certainly have to look closely at what works and what does work and why.
