Someone asked: "What's the difference between a blog, a forum and a conference? - They all look the same to me!"

I'm afraid there's no simple answer to that one. Much depends on the software you are using and the functionality it offers, but it also depends on how you choose to use that software.

My feeling is that a blog is centred on an individual (but it could be a group of individuals) who post an idea for dissemination amongst a wider audience. That wider audience can't post initial ideas, but they can comment on those ideas. Blogs tend to work really well to publicise ideas and as learning journals.

A forum is usually more "democratic" in that anyone can post a message. So they tend to be used more for groups learning together in a social constructivist model.

We had a long discussion about "blogs, forums & the nature of discussion" over on the Moodle forums a couple of years ago. You might find that useful, there's a lot of meat in it: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338 (login as guest if you haven't got a Moodle.org id yet).

Watch this space for future developments and sign up to be our 'friend'!

Watch this space for future developments and sign up to be our 'friend'!

It's probably worth thinking about how active membership of the Norfolk ASTs Learning Community might enhance the work of ASTs.  Seb Gasse has written a blog here in which he reports on the presentation he gave to ASTs introducing blogging.  He has put his PPt presentation in his File Storage.  But I think it might be worth putting a bit of flesh on the bone.  In the AST Network File Storage (use the link on the right of this page or click here: E Networking ) is the PowerPoint presentation that I gave to delegates to the Norfolk E-Learning launch in early November.  It's quite theoretical, but you might be interested. If you're not, ignore it by all means.  After all, one of the beauties of this technology is that you don't have to follow the links!  On the other hand, if following up some background reading about social constructivism is appealing, you might like to look at my del.icio.us links here.

 The point is that this really is a Learning Network.  The active participant should learn more effectively as a result of using the network.  And by active participant I really mean someone who not only reads and comments on other peoples' postings, but who posts themselves.  We're probably all familiar with the teachers' truism that you never really understand something until you've taught it.  Well I think it's the same in this context: you never really undertand what you're doing until you've blogged it!

 More musings to follow.