KM Blog

I'm with you, at least as far as the discussion aspect goes. I have decided that the best way for me to keep up with the comments is to check the "Five Most Recent Comments" and the "Five Most Recent Entries" in the Moveable Type menu rather than move over to the main blog page. It's an ugly and inelegant solution, but it's better than looking at the main page and trying to remember how many comments there were in each topic the last time I checked!

I'd like to try something else. I was interested in wikis at the beginning of the semester and even set up a trial one for a while. Is anyone else interested in doing something new?

I agree - the discussion is really limited by the current format. It's very hard to keep track of posts - especially when you have to scroll through several screens to get back to one that you've commented on. I like to keep up with what others are saying, but I've found it to be a little overwhelming.

I like the mailbox-type system of both infopop and vbulletin. It would definitely make tracking topics a little easier.

I agree with this not being the best system for discussions, but the purpose of this isn't intentionally meant to support that. MT is more of a link sharing (with some comments) type of tool. I'd favor trying a slashcode/php-slash type of tool, but don't want to move too much towards a newsgroup-type interface as we have real-time discussions in class every week that can supplant that. I envision blogs to be more like a discussion starter, perhaps one solution is to go back towards the original concept of individual blogs about each topic maintained by each of you.

I'll send this to our class email list too, since checking (and posting) here don't seem to be so frequent.

If what we need is a simple threaded discussion tool that allows the posting of multiple topics, we could use the tool already provided for this class -- Blackboard. I have used it for a couple of other classes and I know it has its shortcomings, but it is pretty easy to use. We could establish a topic for each us on the Discussion Board where our posts could be commented on. All the discussion topics appear on the initial page and, if I remember correctly, each time a user accesses the Discussion Board for a class in Blackboard, the topics and discussion threads they have not yet viewed are highlighted for them (like unread mail). This is not a very trendy, sexy or high-tech solution, but it might serve our purpose. I'm not overly enthused with the idea of creating and maintaining my own blog plus checking on the postings and comments at a dozen other blogs. As it is I check the KM blog regularly, read everyone else's posts and post/comment when I have something to say-- I don't think I could be nearly as attentive to a dozen blogs.

I agree with Anne Marie. I was talking to Danielle the other day and was wondering why we didn't use Blackboard to begin with. Danielle made the point of wanting to experience new technologies, and I think she's right. This is a great time to try something new, especially for me since I have no experience with these things and can ask you all for help/opinions/etc.

However, I do not want to maintain my own blog, especially since I do not have Internet access at home, and am limited to IT lab hours. I know I would not follow 12 other blogs, and would most likely follow only a few people's. I like the idea of a central site for the class, I just don't know what the best one would be.

I really wish I could contribute something more to help solve this problem, but I feel like I know so little about these technologies that I'm not useful in this area. =(

I empathize strongly with Danielle's desire to use this class as an opportunity to experience new KM technologies. The problem I keep running into is that it seems to take a great deal of time for me to really understand how any particular tool works and even more time to sort out its actual utilities and shortcomings. When I use a KM technology I want to understand the KM principles on which it is based and the KM processes it supports but I often feel like I am so bogged down in getting the technology to work that I never find the larger KM context for applying the technology. The lesson that keeps being reinforced for me is that the "overhead" for using a KMS is terribly high and that most of the tools don't seem cost effective for the tasks to which they are applied.