Article summaries, part deux

Now that I have the mystery of the "Read More" thingy solved (seriously, it should not have been as hard as it was), I can post in ways that are much more eye friendly to anyone visiting directly. Because, for serious, I write really long posts in this thing.

I am sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, listening to hip music, and posting with my handy dandy laptop computer. How hip am I? So hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis. (Two points for those of you who can name the reference.)

And now, I present to you, summaries of four more articles that I have read recently. As in, just before I started typing. And here's the tag:


Seitzinger, Joyce. "Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools." Learning Soluctions e-magazine. July 31, 2006.


Mmm.... Constuctivist learning. How juicy, how delicious, how absolutely essential to any critical thought about why we should blog. This article, ridden with painfully forced references to Star Trek (mixing the Borg with the TOS references, harrumph!) is nonetheless a good elementary break down of constructivist principles. It's something that I'll be looking back at as I delve deeper into constructivism. Although I am still having trouble understanding podcasting as fitting into the constructivist framework. I suppose I can simply ignore that as it does not concern me. Two of my fine classmates are writing on podcasting, perhaps they will be able to illuminate me. Not written for museums, this article contains much of what many other articles that introduce the reader to the magic of Web 2.0 do, but, like I said, good elements of constructivist theory.

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De Moor A & Efimova L. An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proceedings of the 9th international working conference on the language-action perspective on communication modelling (LAP2004), Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

Conversations take place in the blogosphere. These conversations are different from non-online conversations and are unique from other forms of online conversation such as chat and message boards or listservs. Um. Yeah. They call blog conversations "blogosphere stories" citing from a different source. My reaction? "For serious?" written in the margins. I know it's not the innovation of de Moor and Efimova, but I'd never heard it before and laughed right out loud at it.

Some of the choices made by the authors seemed weird to me. In a case study of a conversation that took place over several blogs, they choose only to include those posts that included a quote from a preceding post because they "assumed that quoting a post means that it had a major influence on the thought formation of the poster." Well, that's probably true, but what about others who didn't quote because they didn't see the value in adding to what they figured everyone already knew. They admitted later to have difficulty inventing criteria as to what to include, so there's some slack for them, I guess.

The article did introduce me to the idea that a blogger is involved in both a conversation with herself and one with others. It seems true enough, but is rarely included in the definitions of blogging.

Overall, my impressions were that this article was interesting, but dated. Yes. Dated. 2004. Old. I find myself thinking that of a lot of articles. If I'm looking at literary criticism, anything within the last 20 years goes, but with blogs, anything older than a year and a half is suspect. Madness.

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von Appen K., Kennedy B. and Spadaccini J., Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies, in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 1, 2006 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/vonappen/ vonappen.html

Yes. yes yes yes yes yes yes. Yes. If you're interested in community online and especially in regards to museums and have somehow not read this, go do so now. It's the first paper I've read that says important things. It was the first article I read to broach learning theories (I originally read it two-three months ago) and thank you. If this had been one of the first things I read after thinking up this topic, I might not have felt compelled to move in this direction. Oh, there are things for me to say, but this article gets points for awesomeness. How about 12? That sound fair. ^5 guys. Which, according to the article, means "High Five." I have never seen that in my life before.

So no real summary here. Just gushing.

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Wang, Minjuan, Rhea Fix, and Laura Bock. "Blogs: Useful Tool or Vain Indulgence?" E-Learn 2005. World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education. October 24-28, 2005.

I read this and wrote one word at the top. Lame. Maybe that doesn't reflect what the article is, but I was disappointed at the sell they used. I wanted to know about blogs being a vain indulgence! They only gave me the useful tool sell, and I've already heard that a ton of times. There are three paragraphs on "Doubts about Blogs." It bored me. And I want articles to excite me, to open my mind to possibilities. Move along. Nothing to see here.

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No more articles. I think it's time to move from the general reading and move into specific readings. Because the general readings are getting tedious and repetitive. Better concentrate on that communication theory book I've started.