IWP - Course Notes 8.1
Before RSS and aggregators were introduced in the course, our
learners came up with a list of ways to cultivate personal learning
communities using their weblogs and the internet:
- Contact people through email
- Update website frequently
- Make content interesting
- Network by telling peers about your site
- Write about topics that stimulate conversation
- Bribery, contests, give-aways, quizzes, threats
This is the product of a pre-RSS worldview brainstorm.
While some of these points (like nos 2 and 5) might still apply, I
wonder how their conceptions will change after using an RSS reader
and subscribing to various feeds? Hmmm…
It was suggested in class that personal webpublishers need to drop
the concept of ‘readers visiting their sites’. Rather than
view their content as sitting in one place waiting to be seen, it
should be thought of being added to a giant mindpool of
ideas, where it will be directed into the minds of
those to whom it may be of some value. Technology
facilitates this process. There is no need to ‘attract
readers’, as readers themselves attract the content, so to
speak. Therefore, it is most beneficial for learners to
stay true to their intrinsic interests by writing about them; not
to alter content with the intent to attract.
One learner mentioned that she wasn’t able to post on a
daily basis about her learning because there had never been
enough completed assignments in a week to post that frequently.
Again, this is another concept that learners ought to consider
dropping: that of posting finished pieces of work. By sharing
work in progress, learners allow others to participate in the creation
process, benefitting from questions, insight, dialogue, etc. If
we wait until the project is “finished”, it becomes too
late! Making changes like this requires a shift in perspective;
something related to what Sebastian Fiedler has refered to as ‘disabling personal belief systems’. See the criteria he lists.
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