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.

I am using blogs in two ways:

• on my third year undergraduate module I have set up a module blog on which I post and the students comment. Most of the comments are in response to activities or are giving feedback about the student’s experience. Given these constraints the blog seems to be working well however I wouldhave preferred a system where all the students have their own blog. At the moment this quite a job to set up as we do not have our own blog server at the university. There is also a wiki on this module which is used by groups of students to put together their ideas in response to a set of questions:

• what are the basic web design principles and how do we put them into practice?
• what is “Extensible HyperText Markup Language” (XHTML), how and why should we use it?
• how can we style web pages using cascading style sheets (CSS) and what are the reasons for doing so?
• how can we set up web pages using “extensible markup language” (XML) and should we bother?
• how can we use “Extensible Stylesheet Language” (XSL) to style web pages and what advantages and disadvantages does it have?
• what are the advantages and disadvantages of separating design from content?

On my master’s module each of the students has a blog and they also cooperate as a group on a wiki. They have to use their blogs to provide evidence that they have satisfied the learning outcomes of the module. Their claim for a grade will initially be developed on the wiki and then transfered to their own web pages. Criteria for the grades will be developed by the students in discussion with me, on the wiki, and will provide a basis for the grade claim. At the moment the blogs seem to be working well and I have had some excellent feedback from students. This may be partly because they do not have the opportunity to see one another between sessions, unlike the undergraduate students. At the students requerst we are experimenting with an online week for session 3 (Feb 14 -16). I look forward to seeing how this goes when the only communication is via web pages, blogs, the wiki and email.

I have written a second year module, which will be available next year which is about web publishing in its broader sense and will use blogs and wikis as an integral part of the module and the student’s reflections on their use will form part of the subject matter. I am hoping that the inclusion of the use of blogs and wikis as part of the learning outcomes and assessments will help to make the blogs a more dynamic force in the student’s learning.

I have also added a link to my web site under the My links section in response to some comments I read recently on Stephen Downes’ blog about bloggers who do not say who they are.

It would be interesting to know what the criteria for selection were. Many of the entries are so different from one another that it is difficult to work it out from looking at the blogs themselves. 

Just tried it and have found that suprglu takes some time to refresh. It says in their blog that they do not have a huge server capacity at the moment so it will not refesh pages very quickly. At the moment it looks as if there ise not going to be an easy way of looking at module blogs in real time so I will either have to wait until the refresh situation improves or I will have to devise a methodology that uses the blog amalgamation tools over the longer term. It would still be useful to have a place where all the blogs come together even if the refresh rate is a bit slow.

Here is a link to my page on bloglines, however I find that I have two bloglines accounts, one under hotmail (the new one about blogs) and the other under tiscali. It is fairly easy to move between them by logging out and back in again.

Some of the slides and notes are on the edublogs blog and there is also useful information about blogging at technorati.

Links in the presentation include:

I had a problem with making the links open in a new window. Even editing the html did not work so I may have to right click and do it that way.

I might also take a look at using calendars at kiko.

The two things I found were especially useful was the opportunity to set up a blog (this one ) using wordpress. This allowed me to see what the possiblities were for authorship so that I can set up a range of “posters” if I wish.

The second thing was the use of bloglines to set up a number of RSS feeds to blogs. Of course this means that I have to find some blogs I want to subscribe to and find the time to read the interesting posts.

A third thing, setting up my own RSS feed, I think I will leave to another time.