How the text relates to themes in the course Networked Media – why was it chosen?

This is an article about the use of weblogs in research, and keeping and maintaining a blog is a big part of this course. The blog’s we keep can be seen as meta-blogs; blogs about other blogs. Keeping track on this involves a big amount of research, mainly on the work that other people have already done.
Mortensen and Walker write about the use of weblogs and how they can function as a professional tool but also a personal one; they claim that it is just as useful in both arenas. In comparison with this course, we have been encouraged to fill up out blogs with information that interests us, not only entries with relevance to school. Both of the authors claim that having a blog made it easier staying focused on their research, but also that it helped them as a tool of research. This might be one of the intentions behind encouraging the students to add their own “touch” and content to the blog; it might help them in the right direction in regards to their future career.

Adrian Miles, a Senior Lecturer in New Media at RMIT, claims that “blogs are very useful to document your practice, to encourage and support reflective and process based learning, to nurture peer support and learning, to provide a record of achievement, in assisting idea creation, supporting collaboration, and finally in developing multiliteracies that allow participation within contemporary information ecologies as creators, rather than being limited to being passive consumers.” (Miles, 2006) Miles was part of the team that established the use of blogs for the bachelor of Communication (Media) in 2005, and seeing as it is still in use, it must have served its purpose. Like Mortensen and Walker was at that time, he is using the blog as an equipment for his PhD research. From his article “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning” the main idea behind having a blog in this course is to somehow link it to the research we do in class, and if we have something we are working on outside school.

The HTML part of this course can’t be related to the article, because they decided to focus on personal experience and a more “user friendly” approach, in stead of numbers and statistics. I still think that HTML is an useful tool while keeping a blog, as it allows it to construct your posts (to some extent) as you wish. One part of me wish that I had to read all the three articles that are available for this assignment, as the two others is about Hypertext and Spatial montage, which seems to be very interesting topics. When I find time for it I will try to go through them, as they in many ways (especially the Hypertext one) can be related to blogging.

References:

Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen Ed.41 (2006): 66-9

Mortensen, Torill, and Jill Walker. “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool.” Researching Ict’s in Context. Ed. Andrew Morrison. Oslo: University of Oslo, 2002. 249-79. p.259.