A Sample Researcher Blog

Weblogs facilitating communities of inquiry

As with the discussion board, weblogs can vary dramatically. Many popular weblogs, for example, have no comments facilities as they frequently attract vigorous debate and often, especially with political subjects, a degree of abuse. Weblogs can also offer very limited RSS feeds, inefficient trackback tools or comments features that do not allow for notification of new postings through RSS or Atom feeds or email. However, on the whole and at the time of writing, the features supplied by the major weblog providers allow the user to communicate in the manner described above and hence an examination of the degree to which this medium can effectively facilitate the successful formation of a community of inquiry can be prefaced by an assumption of these fundamental capabilities.

In terms of establishing social presence it can be argued that weblogs offer a significant opportunity for users to project themselves as "real" people. Primarily the blogger is writing to their own area and context, designed to their liking (if the blogger is not a web designer there are a wide range of templates available with every provider) and developing on their previous postings from the online persona they have developed. Indeed, the fact that the blogger is also able to retain ownership of their writing, edit at will, refer to previous items and ideas, and control in its entirety the space and manner in which the weblog is published, can significantly augment their control over their expression and hence increase the opportunity to project and the motivation for doing so.

Further, while the primary tool of communication in weblogs is text, users are equally able to "photoblog", "audioblog" or "videoblog" their entries and all of these kinds of projections are made to an audience that the blogger may well be largely aware of through currently evolving tools indicating subscribers to webfeeds as well as their hyperlinked "blogosphere". Hence the blogger is able to express themselves through multiple media and assess, at the least, their immediate audience and, to an extent, their wider readership.

However, to simply be able to project oneself in online communication is not to be able to necessarily "construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry" as stipulated by Garrison et al. to be necessary for the development of effective cognitive presence. Weblogs undoubtedly support sustained discourse as evidenced by the development and spread of memes and the ever developing nature of the blogosphere (Bloom 2003), but a question asked by many engaging with the technology is the extent to which this discourse is reflective, critical and purposeful. While, for example, this kind of discourse is not apparent in the majority of weblogging systems developed largely for socialising among teenagers, the charge that this invalidates the medium is inappropriate due to the breadth of use of weblogging.

A weblog is a reflective medium (hence comparisons with and use as journals and diaries), and the nature of publishing to an audience in a manner that will be archived, can be referred to and for which the author maintains responsibility and ownership has developed a certain style of expression. Certain research (Herring et al, 2004) across the blogging spectrum has indicated that there is a possibility that weblogs encourage significantly more in depth and extended writing than communication by email or through discussion board environments and yet less extensive than more formal modes of publication, producing in an academic sense a kind of discourse somewhere between the conversational and the article. The value of this is evidenced through numerous examples of academic weblogs taking advantage of weblogs in order to engage with their peers and students and to reflect on their own learning (e.g. PhDWeblogs, Crooked Timber).

It could be argued that in terms of facilitating effective teacher presence, weblogs are even less potent than discussion boards in their ability to empower the teacher to design, facilitate or direct cognitive and social processes towards valuable educational outcomes. This argument can be based on the premise that a teachers weblog is essentially entirely separate to a learners weblog and the learner under no compulsion to read the teachers weblog. However, Clay Shirky observed in his essay "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality" (2003) that invariably, weblogs fall into a "balance of inequality" in the same way that any system does if allowed "the very act of choosing" which "spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution". Effective use of a weblog by a teacher arguably places them as an organic central node to the class, and given the simplicity with which students would be able to aggregate their webfeed and the selective "push" nature of this kind of aggregation - where webfeeds are, despite being "pulled" by the users aggregator, apparent to the end user as a pushed form of communication in much the same way as email - it is far more likely that the teacher will be able to facilitate and direct cognitive and social processes.

In terms of design, however, it appears in a basic sense that there is little in weblogs that can be controlled in order to reach this outcome. While discussion boards can be placed alongside content in packaged courses and with limited opportunities to use the technology in ways unforseen by the designer, a weblog is essentially free form and there is little, besides providing templates, guidelines and facilitating the group as a whole that the teacher can do to actively impact on the technical structure of their experience. However, to introduce the metaphor of the traditional classroom, it is reasonable to ask to what extent cognitive and social processes can be impacted on and to what degree this is desirable within any context. For example, if a class is rigidly structured so that activities take place at fixed and inflexible times, contains set subject matter and students are assessed through standard matrixes, the teacher takes little consideration of the benefits of learner driven experiences, and the vastly different requirements and approaches of individual students as stressed by Gardner (1989). Naturally this is not to say that an anarchistic structure is appropriate but rather to suggest that one of the key attributes of weblogs is that they have within them "incorporated subversion" (Squires 1999) which allows learners to express themselves and explore their context in ways independent of the original designers intentions:

Rather than design with constraint in mind, design with freedom and flexibility in mind ... this emphasises the active and purposeful role of learners in configuring learning environments to resonate with their own needs, echoing the notions of learning with technology through "mindful engagement" (Squires 1999 p. 1)

Consequently, to introduce another physical and familiar metaphor, it is not to the town planners' city that one might look when designing the communication tools of an OLE but rather to the "natural" city, evolving as it has done to meet the needs and actions of the individuals within it. Writing in 1965, Christopher Alexander compared the tree like structure of the modern, designed city to the semilattice of natural cities and concluded that:

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces. (Alexander, 1965)

And as our teaching and learning environments increasingly move online, it is precisely this opportunity of operating as a "receptacle for life" which weblogs provide, as opposed to the delineated structure of a discussion board. This allows a teacher to implement designs, critically incorporating subversion, which can be argued to give a learner an opportunity to realistically develop "personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes".