Well, we are two weeks into the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere. Students are really contributing. We have a lot of information pouring in. Students are also being good troopers getting into unfamiliar technologies, trying to track each other's comments, and generally pushing forward. At this stage, I see the following issues:
- Tracking conversations
- Tracking the zeitgeist
- Maintaining an integrated view of what is going on
All of these issues have to do with funneling information from the giant information pipe we have created down to people. We've made some progress on all of the issues. The real question I have is whether our solutions have sometimes been worse than the cure.
Take tracking the zeitgeist. We've turned students onto using my.yahoo and their own news aggregators such as newzcrawler. Well, that's all fine, but students may choose to follow only a small portion of the information set we have set out, meaning the class is going to have different views of what is going on.
Perhaps this is just what naturally goes on in most settings. However, I wonder if the information overflow is not the main culprit. This is potentially an issue for future research. It has something to do with organizing the copious information meal for human consumption in a functioning environment.
Tracking conversations seems to be a work in progress in the blogosphere in general. One method, the trackback, is interesting. A student in the class posted a helpful link about how to do this. We also held a clinic, but the trackback really depends on everyone enabling it. More general mechanisms like technorati are overwhelmed by the enormity of the task they are undertaking.
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