Libraries and Plogs

August 12th, 2004

Randy writes::

“I have thought about embedding blogs into individual courses, and am aware of at least one professor, a good friend who teaches at U Lethbridge, who uses blogs in his classes. Last year, I began suggesting to students in some of the fourth-year engineering design courses that they consider using blogs as a means of communication between design group members. In other words, pure project management. This fall, in my library and research skills instruction sessions, I will be encouraging the students to use blogs from the outset to manage their design projects, thus reducing the number of phone calls, e-mails, text messaging, and other means of communication, as they work in teams on their capstone design projects.”

I have been fascinated of late with groups that work with blogs to communicate with one another. There was an article published recently on the use of project blogs in the corpoarate ennvironment. Called “plogs”, they incoporate weblogs into projects as a communication tool for it’s members. Of course, RSS fits right in here, so that one need not access the blog directly to read any updated information. Plus, the collaboration aspect fits in as well. In our small world of library science, we have LISNews as an ongoing “plog”, although I’m not sure what that project outcome would be. Do all projects need outcomes? Or can they be ongoing?

Comments are closed.