weblogging for beginners August 29, 2006
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , trackbackweblogging is easy. yes. but actually it takes more time than I expected. after hosting my weblog for a while at wordpress I decided to move it over to our server at the Centre for Social Innovation. Thanks to my colleges Erwin and Sebastian we managed to install it here and to arrange to template more or less according to the one that I previously used. Since there has been an update on the template however I cannot arrange the sidebar widgets the way I want it.
Overall, the whole issue triggered some important questions that are relevant for our research project iCamp. We plan to use weblogs for a cross-cultural collaboration experiment with participants from four different countries across Europe. We assume that most of the participants (facilitators as well as students) are not familiar with weblogs. The subject to be covered is “research methods in social sciences”. So some of the questions that we are facing are:
- how long will it take for participants to get used to the use of weblogs?
- how many other tools should we introduce to them (as weblogs are only part of the whole setting)?
- how much guidance and support will be necessary?
- etc, etc.
So overall I think that using weblog in an educational setting as we envision is not so trivial from a “logistics” and support point of view (leaving aside the pedagogical challenges) as it might sound in the beginning.
Comments»
Hi Barbara,
Indeed getting people to blog is not trivial. As with all new stuff it requires some curiousity to help you past the first steps that always feel awkward and time consuming.
Two things come to mind reading your posting.
First, adoption of blogging as a conversational and reflection format will be higher\faster if it becomes part of the information gathering and sharing routine in iCamp. If it simply is the channel you have decided to use for certain things that will drive adoption.
(I cannot tell you how much time I spend blogging, both reading and writing, as it is simply the way I gather and digest news and information. Nobody asks me how much time I spend doing my job)
Second, if you can take people away from the blogging tool interfaces so that they do not see the options for templates, trackbacks, html stuff and whatnot that helps too. If all they see is a text editor and a button that publishes it on the site (which can be all kinds of types), it does not scare as much. Tools like Qumana (disclaimer: I am part of their thinktank) or the recently published Live Writer of Microsoft do just that. Or it could be the bookmarklets that come with e.g. WordPress or Movable Type themselves.