Blogging in the classroom, Part 3. Developing an initial view on klogging
There are certainly times when blogging seems to be an entirely self-referential phenomenon. Whether we discuss it publicly or not, most of us seem to go through some form of reflection, and possibly angst, about what blogging is and how it fits into our routines. I first encountered AKMA as a blogger when I came across his riff on the phases of blogging. (This also led to a bit of back and forth between us when I realized we had already met face-to-face.)
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Choosing to take up, and then stay with, blogging pretty much drives you to considerations of what you've gotten yourself into. If your professor or your boss has introduced blogging to you in the form of a requirement, you're less likely to raise or reflect on these questions.
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As perhaps a gross generalization, MBAs and executives are a disciplined lot. They marshall their curiosity pretty carefully and are quick to ask "what's in it for me?" Claims of "it's cool!" lead an an appropriate "so what?" pretty quickly. If you're pushing blogging as a valuable use of their time, they'll expect you to have worked out a cogent answer.
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One of the critical elements of understanding k-logs is a sense for how they operate in an organizational context. While weblogs are an individual and informal community phenomenon, k-logs also exist in specific organizational contexts. Part of their power is bridging between these two worlds. But part is also how they fit into existing organizational dimensions of power and influence.
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In a classroom setting, some of this can be addressed through lecture and discussion, of course. Two other things are possible if the group is also using blogs as well as talking about them. The first is to use Radio's subscription and aggregation capabilities to cross-subscribe to everyone else's feeds. This produces a different kind of environment for tracking and commenting on each other's work in ways that are quite different from the threaded discussions more typically found in class settings. Second, I used Radio's categories feature to create sub-channels that I used to pass information and links on to discrete project groups. This generates concrete experience with some of the potential of k-logs and provides raw material for discussion. Again, in the future I would call more explicit attention to this use of weblogs. I would also build in more time to explicitly review and reflect on how these aspects of blogging were influencing the nature of the learning and the work product.
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