Lou Rosenfeld recently posted an article about the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere. The article and ensuing comments are fascinating. I encourage you to go read them.
One issue that was raised in the comments was the extent to which participant blogs might just become isolated islands of people standing on their own soap boxes. If this happens, the project has failed.
No doubt, the isolated islands phenomenon is frequent in the greater blogosphere. In the BIT320 blogosphere, such isolation is liable to lead to participant abandonment of the process and failure. I like to think Andy Seidl and I have come up with an exciting way to avoid that fate, the innovative use of RSS feeds to create a sense of place. We are still perfecting the implementation, but the main idea is as follows:
- Create a set of categories that can be used by all bloggers. Bloggers can add to the set of categories, but what they add will be available to everybody.
- Have feeds (and indeed synthetic blogs, aka channels) that cut across individual blogs based on these categories.
- Present a unified view of the set of aggregating feeds (blogs, channels) created in step 2 and allow people to subscribe to all of them.
Now, the key to getting any value out of all of this is to get people to participate. For the average participant, the question is typically in this form, "Is the effort I go through to post worth what I get out of it?" To some degree, that's where ego gratification such as the various ranking schemes Lou mentions in his post can come into play. Ultimately though, I think participants will need to see that the pot of knowledge is worth more to them than just the parts they put in.
Leave a comment