Well, it’s been a week since I got back from Phoenix, AZ where Clare and I were presenting a couple of papers in a symposium at SITE 2005, and I’m finally getting back into my regular routine!
I get a lot out of going to academic conferences. Admittedly, at some you get overwhelmed with the sheer number of papers, but SITE is a relatively small conference specifically in the area of IT and teacher education. It was a great opportunity for meeting others researchers and learning about related research. I always find it reassuring getting feedback from discussants and other researchers, and their feedback helps me figure out what areas I need to work on.
A number of papers were on the use of weblogs in education. A couple talked about blogs for collaboration and reflection (Babiuk, 2005; West, Wright & Graham, 2005), one to build community Westhoff (2005) and another (need to figure out who) to obtain feedback from anyone on the Internet.
Well, I’m not sure if “anyone” would give me feedback on ideas in my blog, given that people from outside the course generally don’t tend to comment on blogs in a course (Westhoff, 2005), and because of the power log curve that Downestalks about, I doubt people would read and comment on my wee blog. I noticed Peter talking about this, too. But, wouldn’t it be fantastic if other researchers working in your research area did?
For me, the KSN provides me a kind of networked community, but I still prefer to attend virtual meetings in person at OISE, using Breeze only to connect to international colleagues. Most of these people I also met first in a face-to-face at conferences like the Summer Institute (Dan said he wanted to have synchronous and/or f2f in his ideal graduate community, as well) Would I be able to develop that kind of research-intensive relationship online through a blog community?
Leave a Reply