The impact of blogs on students. The self organizing aspects.

This reflection is on the effective self organizing going on in the course blogs. It is impressive that the first years have posted such a lot of things but also organized such a lot with each other .

Wiley 2003 "on line self organizing social systems" . Updated in 2007 (he did a book chapter to follow it up.)  stated basically that  a group of people interacting with each other can  do self organizing without one person giving out orders.

 I see that  just by giving students a tool ,the blog, they go onto co-ordinate their own e mail and face book and trips. No central person telling them to attend additional lectures and buy useful books  from third years or see vital web sites to construct homework .

I see evidence that the learning objects they make are much better than the tutor made moodle and list of papers to read in module handbooks.

 One tutor cannot serve so many complex learners easily .

A good tutor needs to find out  what they know , don’t know and intelligently choose learning objects and then teach by putting them into order… then they judge the usefulness for each student by evaluating the effects for each student. 

So the work for me is to design Intelligent tutoring systems or  support a tool for a group  of students so they can spend time solving these problems. the work is carried out  not on behalf of the group but by the group themselves .  

Just like an ants nest students just get on with work, support , filter and help each other  for each other’s success in learning.

 Now the question is what is the difference of blogs and facebook for student conversations and learning?