Karen McComas

Experience
Some of my work includes using weblogs, nicenet, email, delicious website bookmarking, instant messenger, MOOs, etc.

Weblogs
These allow for posting of student work at various stages in the development process. My current usage is a requirement for my students to post their controversy logs in our class weblog (http://www.muwp.org/muwp30) prior to submitting them in class. In this way I can monitor their work and intervene when and if necessary. For example, this evening I noticed that in two of the controversy logs posted today the students weren't really listing controversies. In fact, the tendency was to list points of view (this vs that) instead of the controversy that this and that speak to. This preview of their work allowed me to send a quick and short email to the class mailing list about this issue. Now, the students have a chance to fix before they post their log or revise their already posted log. The logs themselves are not due in class until tomorrow morning and it is that version that I will evaluate.

Pat Delaney and I talked earlier this week about a number of things but one of those focused on the use of weblogs and the fact that while weblogs are useful for many reasons they can be nightmares for many other reasons. The more I use weblogs the more I see their value most as a content management system. As a discussion tool I'm not sold. The most successful conversations that I have seen take place on a weblog (and by successful I mean a conversation where several people post in response to some question or prompt and then those people read what others have written and respond to those writings in ways that provoke thinking and move the conversation forward) have been those that take place in a compressed period of time, making it much more like a synchronous event than a non-synchronous event. While I have yet to flush out the core of my experiences, I sense a fundamental different in how people respond to and use weblogs for conversations as compared to how they respond to and use a different discussion tool - say nicenet - for conversations. Yet, we know that a social community is growing and developing on the web that relies upon individuals with weblogs reading and responding to one another. The way that happens, however, is really the fascinating part of the process and speaks very clearly and directly about the potential technology has to be disruptive. Numerous individuals on the net read many other weblogs and respond to what they have read by creating a post in their own weblog which the other person can read if they are paying attention in a very particular way to what is happening in the weblog world.

WIKI
The WIKI allows me (gives me permission to?) post my thoughts in a way that suggests and in fact requires revision. This is the very nature of the WIKI space-to revise.

FlickR
How have I been using FlickR and how is that different from my traditional and routine practices? At first I simply used it to store photos. I became enamored of the ability to create sets and then to develop html/flash badges to put on web pages that would lead someone to the complete slideshow. From there, I began to see that tagging the photos opened up more possibilities, particularly when Paul Allison, Will Banks and myself began posting pictures to FlickR from the same event. This is when we began to discover that the ability to place tags on pictures enabled us to interact or collaborate in our attempts to document the work of the Tech Matters Advanced Institute that took place the third week of July at Marshall University in Huntington, WV.