I have been looking around for other peoples ideaa on the relative merits of blogs and discussion boards and have come up with the follwing so far. (It is copied from my Tiddlywiki about a project on formative assessment so I hope the formatting works)
Lee Lefever had some interesting ideas about this on his blog post “What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?” written in 2004.
I have adapted the ideas to look at the diferences between blogs and the WebCT discussion area.
The main points for me are:
- Locus of Control and New Topics: blogs can be under the control of the individual whereas on WebCT students cannot start new topics. Formatting of blogs is also under the control of the student.
- Responses: Blog topics have comments and discussion topics have replies. Blog posts encourage comment on the post rather than the initiation of new material. That can be done with a new blog post.*
- Tools: Blogs have a number of useful tools which include: Trackback, RSS, Aggregation, Permalinks, Cross linking, Categories etc. WebCT discussions are starting to have these but they are not as flexible.
- Chronology: Blogs are consistently arranged with the most recently posted topics at the top of the page, regardless of new comments. A discussion board, can be somewhat more confuding in it’s layout.*
- Personal Connections: Blogs can allow online community members to develop personal connections with the webloggers relatively quickly.
Lee has made some further comments in a later post A Blog Post Says “Here It Is, Dig It” which has an elaboration of his original ideas. I got to this post from another one by Marcus ODonnel which has some further interesting ideas and some interesting comments.
Dave Warlick has some comments on this on his 2 Cents worth blog. Although he does not add any points that might be useful for me in this project.
