I'll be the first to admit it: I was never really that into blogging in the first place. Of course I'd lurk, reading the "cool" blogs, following the trendsetters. Right up until the point that the trend setters got so fast at setting trends that following them was too much effort.
I remember the first time that I started following what Robert Scoble was talking about when he was still a technology evangelist at Microsoft, I also remember not following him shortly after. Not that he wasn't interesting or didn't know what he was talking about, but more due to the fact that at the time following his thoughts, comments...replies to comments was just too much work.
Maybe it was me. I started using various RSS news feeds and most of these just aren't very good at providing an interface in which you can follow the train of thought from the blog entry, into the comments and onwards. Yes everyone published an RSS feed for the comment stream coming out of their blog, but then that disassociates the comments from the feed.
Ironically services like Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) allow people like Robert Scoble to be just as verbose as they want may actually save the day. The conversational nature of twitter allows an engagement with the readers, whilst keeping the thread alive. Want to introduce a new case in point, drop it in using any of the multitude of URL shortening services (Tiny Url, Bitly to name but two), and there it is, and best of all: its all pushed directly to me.
You may say but how is this different from just following the blog and its comments? Well, the conversation is king: the blog post is no longer the starting point, the idea of the conversation is, the blog post just so happens to be a point in the thread, and ultimately the thread pulls everything together.
So what does this have to do with anything that I'm involved with? Well the idea of the conversation being king is an idea that I've been working with for a fairly long time. The fundamental principle of the simulation based learning projects that have been developed at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law are underpined by a transaction. This is a sequence of events or tasks, each reliant on the previous, and developed in the subsequent. Sound familiar?
So my next and final question to ponder is:
Can there be a correlation/correspondence between a (notional) educational conversation (how to do this, what does that mean) and the functional transaction thread and how do you make that link?
