Tom's Blog

I think letting write us five Blog-posts per week was a very good idea from Bud - especially in terms of didactics. To write meaningful posts and to contribute to the knowledge of the class, students have to really and (pro) actively deal with the subjects instead of just listening and consuming. Students are required to go out and to gain new knowledge that is interesting for others as well and how Bud put it in his blogging guideline “knowledge discovery is aided by allowing largest number of people to participate.”

Here, I feel myself in the role of a journalist or author, writing about pros and cons and trying to make my contributions interesting and attractive. But even by giving just status updates or copying or citing other sources exposes one to ideas outside the classroom. Although it’s sometimes hard to keep up with latest developments and not to “fall behind” because nothing new happened in the projects, people still can write about topics related to the course or post 20% about off-topic issues.

However, not everybody might be comfortable with this form of open discussion – which the whole world can follow. I think that there must be a certain kind of extrovert behavior in a blogger that can not be generated or motivated by grading ones blog- one must post for the pleasure of posting ;-) and not because of external influence.

As our IS696 course is the major’s capstone we are required to write some kind of documentation and I now personally prefer the blogging alternative. My Word-document containing all my posts exceeds 40 pages now and I think the page count equals a small software proposal – with the difference that it was fun to write it ;-)

The value of taking the Learningremix site online and not keeping it a private forum in which only class participants can login is questionable. There might be a few good comments (i.e. that this Chidambaram guy is right :-D) but it mostly attracted spammers and possibly prevented comments which weren’t meant to shared with the outside world(?).

To conclude, I would like to thank Bud for being so innovative and to expose us to the latest technological trends of which we might still be unaware of and to give us the full experience of Web 2.0!

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