Community of Inquiry

Konrad Glogowski [http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/static-page-1/] has some very interesting reflections on his 8th grade bloggers, and how they are forming a community of inquiry - becoming writers, primarily - it looks like their reading feeds into their writing, which is the best way to achieve active learning.

It really was food for thought, and my response was:

What you have to say about the emerging properties of a "community of inquiry as a network of semantic relations" is fascinating. I work in e-learning, and try to dangle tempting discussions and blog affordances in front of students' and lecturers' noses. Works well here and there.

I have been trying to get to grips with the relations between blogs and discussion forums, and hey! Its right there in your blog:

1. Discussion forums are rather careful, collaborative, tentative (recorded) conversations.
2. Blogs start off (lift off) as personal 'voices' - they are not 'writing' in the everyday mundane sense of the word, they are 'own' voices, quite autobiographical, often a particular fascet of that person's personality, and often a fascet that's a little different from what others might see 'in the street' as it were.
3. 'Blog-mists', which is the best name I can give to what your students have achieved, is the next step up: when the power of personal voices gets connected across the blogosphere. A semantic web if there ever was one.
4. Students on a course I work with, online and offline, have moved enthusiastically into an online environment (no blogs yet). But the most stunning thing they have done is to produce a course diary in book form - a new person takes the book (physically) and writes up the next week's experiences (on paper) and reads it to the class at the beginning of each week (approximately).
5. My aim for the next phases is to get all of it running together: online discussions, personal blogs, blog-mists, and to keep the paper course/book diary. Then see what kinds of semantic mists emerge, and try to be on hand to help it along (if it needs help!).
6. I will also be introducing specific meta-data tools (Inspiration, Concept Map, Star Tree Studio) to enable them to map out semantic relationships that can be shared and customised between students.

I will then watch to see what emerges between the collaborative conversations in discussion forums, the personal voices in blogs, the blog-mists in the collective blog space, and the sharing of meta-data semantic relationships in the collaborative software.

Stephen Downes was right when he said (some time back, writing on learning objects) that facilitating e-learning is like conducting and orchestra. Except here people can play more than one instrument at a time. Any thoughts?