** My Intellectual Flakes **

Nancy White’s paper on blog community has been acclaimed as the best research article by Edublog award. Here are some of the ideas from the article.

The online community set on discussion forum are usually clearly bounded communities with authentication, registration, etc. The new type of online community in blogosphere makes it imperative to study the change in individual and collective identify, power and control. The balance between the individual and the group has to be redefined.

White also categorised blog community into three groups: one blog centric, topic centric and boundaried community. For each type, the power structure and community dynamics are different. She further contrast the three categories from the perspective of technical architecture, social architecture and content.

However, the blog-supported learning community in my study can’t fit into any of the category. It’s kinda like both single blog centric and topic-centric. The community blog serves the role as the central node of the community. But this central role was not organically emergent, but initiated in a top-down fashion. In addition to the tension between group and individual blogger, the tension between top-down intervention and bottom-up emergence of community also becomes complicated in blog community.

Robin Hamman also categorized blog community into three kinds: closed blogs, blogs as conduit of information and blog as conversation. In light of this,  the blog-supported community among preservice teachers in my study seems both closed blogs and blogs as conversation.