Bud Gibson, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, writes about using TypePad in the classroom. On the three reasons why blogging is not just another technology in the classroom fad Bud writes,
By design, blogging allows individuals
to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without
having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design
consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with
students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one
person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit
your pages or even delete them.Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very
easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place
while still maintaining individual attribution.Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and
resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did
ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but
they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly
produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs
make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.
Ian:
Thanks for the mention and thanks for persevering down to the end where this quote is pulled from. I think the part you cited is in many ways the meat of this matter for the blogging community. I probably should have put this part higher, but this was a complex post with more than one message.
Have you considered making community creation more a part of the typepad or MT products? I see it a little bit in livejournal.
I can’t really discuss future product plans on this blog but suffice to say we are very interested in the community building potential around blogs. One of the things we really like about the LiveJournal is its great community. We also recently announced a partnership with Friendster which integrates social networking with blogging in interesting ways.