Submitted to Web-based communities 2004, 24-26 March 2004, Lisbon, Portugal. Available at https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-35344 LEARNING WEBS: LEARNING IN WEBLOG NETWORKS Lilia Efimova Telematica Instituut P.O.Box 589, 7500 AN Enschede, The Netherlands Lilia.Efimova@telin.nl Sebastian Fiedler Medienp��dagogik (Media Pedagogy), Universit��t Augsburg Philosophisch- Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakult��t, Universit��t Augsburg, Universit��tsstra��e 10, D-86135 Augsburg, Germany Sebastian.Fiedler@cognitiveArchitects.de ABSTRACT This article explores how professionally oriented weblog projects support the emergence of loosely coupled learning networks. We provide an overview of the technical infrastructure of this particular form of personal webpublishing and the social ecosystems that emerge through current weblog authoring practices. Furthermore, we suggest that some weblog ecosystems can be conceptualized as learning webs. These learning webs appear to meet the specific needs of knowledge workers for flexible and dynamic learning environments. Some preliminary results of qualitative data collection in this area are shared and some further lines of research are proposed. KEYWORDS personal webpublishing, weblogs, self-organized learning, loosely coupled learning networks 1. INTRODUCTION Since 1999 personal publishing systems for the World Wide Web experience a growing popularity and explosive distribution. While the early years of the World Wide Web were characterized by an increasing differentiation of prerequisite knowledge and skills (programming, visual design, content production, etc.) for most types of sophisticated content publication, personal webpublishing can be conceived as a counter- movement, which enables people with very little technical knowledge to tap the Web as a medium for publication, social networking, and collaboration. In this context, one particular publication format and its surrounding practices were popularized under the label of weblogs and weblog authoring or weblogging. Simply explained weblogs are personal "diary-like-format" websites enabled by easy to use tools and open for everyone to read. Though the average public weblog is a personal diary mostly of interest for its author���s family and friends (Henning, 2003), one can observe a growing cluster of weblogs used by professionals as personal knowledge repositories, learning journals or networking instruments. Used in this context, weblogs address interests and needs of their authors, but they also create an opportunity for others to benefit from having emergent ideas and personal notes captured in public spaces instead of private collections. We want to argue in this paper that the growing number of professionally oriented weblog projects is offering an emergent environment for the creation of loosely coupled learning networks that transcend organisational and institutional boundaries.

2 2. WEBLOGS Weblogs are not easy to define in one sentence. Most authors agree that a weblog is "a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order" (Walker, 2003), but then discuss specific characteristics that make weblogs different from other forms of webpublishing (e.g. Winer, 2003). The difficulty of defining weblogs has something to do with the fact that they could have different goals, uses, or writing styles with only one thing in common: format. Occasional weblog readers are likely to notice two characteristics of weblogs: writing as a collection of small entries and an informal personal voice. Entries, which comprise a weblog, are usually addressed as posts. Most recent posts are displayed on a weblog homepage, while old posts could be retrieved via chronological and, in some cases, topic-based archives. A post can be anything between a link to an on-line article and a short essay, but in most of cases weblog posts are relatively small stand-alone entities that do not require reading the entire content of a weblog to be comprehended. Many posts link to interesting on-line articles, earlier discussions or related readings. They usually enable readers and other weblog authors to add comments or link back to a particular post using its permalink (permanent URL), which is usually generated by all popular weblog systems. Most weblogs are authored by individuals, also known as webloggers (or bloggers), although group weblogs or organizational weblogs can be found as well. Most weblogs are written informally, often as a narration of their authors' browsing, thinking and reflecting. They are perceived as "unedited personal voices" (Winer, 2003) and not expected to be objective. However, this is only a description of the "public" appearance of weblogs. It would be incomplete without looking at the somewhat "hidden" technical infrastructure of weblogging that enables the emergence of new practices and a particular social ecosystem. 2.1 Technical infrastructure enabling weblogs The technical infrastructure that enables weblogs can be summarized in three categories: tools to write and publish weblogs (weblog tools), tools to read weblogs (news aggregators), and tools enabling finding weblog posts or connections between them (searching and tracking tools). Below we provide a brief outline of characteristics of each group. The average weblog tool works as a lightweight content management system. It keeps a database of text entries and other pieces of content (such as picture or sound files), supports adding and editing of items, and simplifies publishing to the Web, by processing content through a set of pre-defined templates holding all the formatting information for a particular visual presentation. While simple weblog systems only provide a chronological organisation of posts, the more advanced systems also support clustering entries into categories or labelling them with additional meta-data entries such as keywords and topics. These features allow for alternative retrieval strategies and additional views on particular contents. Many weblogging tools do not only generate HTML pages, but can also encode their published content in a XML-based format known as RSS. These RSS encoded content feeds can be harvested by so called news aggregators (also known as RSS readers). These programs automatically check subscribed weblog feeds for updates and display their content. In this way readers can easily keep up with many weblogs (and an increasing number of other websites), without navigating the actual web pages. In fact, this convenient method for monitoring large numbers of sources has led to a widespread use of RSS feed readers among weblog authors. In many cases weblogs without RSS encoded feeds have a hard time to attract regular readers anymore. Weblogging is also supported by many specific searching and tracking tools. For example, there are tools for searching content on single weblogs, group of weblogs (e.g. weblogs someone reads), or across all weblogs. Next to it are tools that provide notification about new comments or links to a particular post, allow the tracking of hyperlinks between weblogs, and even identify clusters of weblogs based on their hyperlink connections or content similarity. Other tools monitor and display exceptionally popular web pages (books, products) that get heavily hyper-linked by weblog authors. Weblog writers and their readers can already find flexible and easy-to-use tools for writing and publishing their own content, for monitoring and analysing the publications of others, and for searching and