August 8, 2004
The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere
The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere is a production quality blog system designed to support classroom and small team learning. The project is in collaboration with Andy Seidl of MyST Technology. We expect the site to go live about one week before Labor Day, 2004 and to be in use by over 30 students starting September 9, 2004.
In blogs, participants make frequent entries in a running web journal. The journnal's contents are displayed on a web page and made available for easy syndication using RSS, a standardized XML format. An advantage of syndicating content using a standardized format like RSS is that creating and obtaining tools to process and aggregate large numbers of journal entries is relatively easy. By looking at the individual posts and these aggregations, particpants are able to get a picture of what each other is thinking, see how this thinking is evolving, and influence that evolution.
The project goal
The goal of this project is to better expose distributed participants’ evolving understanding of relevant topics as we proceed through BIT320. BIT320 is a course at Michigan Business School about the role of databases and xml in businesses' information infrastructure.
One might wonder why one would go to the trouble of creating a blogosphere vs. relying on traditional tools like testing. Traditional tools like testing best reveal learners’ understanding of received knowledge and stylized facts. A large part of BIT320 is oriented toward projects where students apply what they are learning in class to real-world problems. As such, the problems and solutions start out ill-defined and then evolve. Further, as class members try to solve these problems, they are separated from other class members by both time and space.
What's the payoff in BIT320?
We are using Andy’s MyST platform because its internals are based on a strong foundation of knowledge representation that should make exposing learners' understanding easier.
The blogosphere will expose all of the different class projects and ideas to both the instructor and other particpants, allowing them to contribute to each others' learning even if they are not together. Such participatory processes have been shown to improve the learning of both the person receiving help and the person helping. Further, if sufficiently diverse, group judgment has been shown to exceed expert judgment. The level of cross-group participation enabled by the blogosphere is well beyond that offered by paper journals and email, usual traditional means of collaboration in distributed settings.
So, generally, the payoff is: (1) getting a better picture of what people are thinking; (2) observing how their thinking is evolving over time; (3) allowing group participation in this evolution. This has obvious value in a classroom situation like BIT320. It also has value in project management and any sort of distributed organizational collaboration. We are actively discussing these types of opportunities with outside organizations. Eventually, we hope these discussions will lead to additional projects to be reported here.