When Blogging4Educators started, I understood we had designed a number of environments to interact with participants, mainly, our YG and two blogs to host weekly discussions. During the first two weeks, fascinating conversations developed as we shaped, defined and built ideas dialogically on our blog threads.

On week 3, however, the task was to post entries and tag them blogging4educators and/or b4echallenge. We started experimenting with the power of tagging not only to organize, classify and describe our user-generated content on the web, but as a way of bringing conversations together, helping our edublogs talk to each other by decentralizing the discussion. We all started reflecting on different aspects of the week’s topic making it even more enriching and multifaceted as we allowed the new bloggers in our session to find their voice and to build their own readership. (Not bad in less than 4 weeks!)

So instead of converging on one spot, conversations are distributed, helping ideas flow creating interconnected semantic contexts. We are generating blogtalk, edublogtalk, metablogtalk, we are seeding the web with our ideas, but through tagging we are generating a context that helps us build open circles of thought and interaction.  

Since week 4 started, I’ve been reading non-stop. From Konrad Glogowsky’s reflective post to Lilian’s teaching context and Carla’s reaction with Fear 2.0 plus all their comments!  I simply don’t know where to start contributing to the discussion. It’s so deep, so broad, so complex and so essential.  As Will Richardson said in The New Face of Learning “In this new interactive Web world, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge”.  I guess this post is just to say I’ll feed a bit more on your reflections and add my own piece to this learning puzzle. What do we talk about when we talk about blogs in education?

Image: this is what Edublogtalk looks like in Websites as Graphs

Related readings: Deconstructed Distributed Conversations
                                 The Web as Distributed Knowledge