Barbara Dieu

I have just come across  and uploaded here (pdf file) a good review published by FutureLab UK in 2006. It deals with creativity, the role of new technology in fostering it and the barriers and obstacles to its development in traditional educational settings. There is also a large reference list to be consulted.

Aaron Campbell has written a good comparative study of different weblogging platforms (for language teaching). Together with R. Ammann, we have also reviewed Elgg at its early stages.

There is also a list that participants of a workshop I gave on weblogging in 2005 compiled in a wiki.

As I mentioned in other posts here, I am using a personal install of Wordpress (which also sports a MU version)  while my students are on wordpress.com (free). I am very happy with it.

Thanks Sylvia. The Live Journal links opened at home yesterday evening but they took a long time to load. This, added to my unstable connection in the past days, may have been the cause of "server not found" messages. I will check at school this afternoon with the IT dept.

so as I see it a blog has a much wider range of possibilities- beyond the merely cerebral and intellectual- to the creative... it is in fact an artistic canvas that can be filled in many individualistic and collaborative ways.....

I totally agree with you Michael and would like to add to it the concepts of "ownership" and "openness". While the messages on the forums usually stay in the closed environments they were generated and the writers cannot easily retrieve them (some of them are even removed after some time), posts on blogs are archived in your space and open to the Web.

I have been using Wordpress.com as the basic platform with my classes. It offers static and dynamic pages, several privacy options and different authorship levels (see my post in blogged out)