Posts made by Barbara Dieu

Hello Timb,
I totally agree with you that blogs are powerful webpublishing platforms which allow you not only to establish your presence online, experiment with different forms of expressing yourself, document your thoughts and learning process but also make contact with and exchange ideas with other interesting people, whom you would never ever meet in your daily routine at school or college.

I feel, like James, that blogging is basically an individual pursuit and that it tends to form more loosely joined communities (communities of interest). What people write does not often get much commenting, unless you are well-known, write compellingly well or thought provoking posts.

It is true that environments like Elgg, My Space and LivJournal allow you to find people with similar interests more quickly and bring your blog into evidence in a more restricted context than the Web at large. Most successful bloggers have found a niche and only blog about certain topics. This specialization tends to bring mor readership.

However, for ordinary citizens, a blog gives the freedom to publish and document their thoughts and signals their presence online. I do not think that most blogs are started having collaboration in mind. From my experience, collaboration may spring as a result of finding someone whose writing and ideas resonate with yours.

How would you envisage an exciting collaborative environment using blogs?



Hello Ricky,

Mathematics is not my strong area but I could definitely imagine myself blogging about it as it would help me make sense and reflect on my thinking process.

Darren Kuropatwa is a young American k12 Math blogger who has been moving and shaking in this area. Check out A Difference and ApCalculus.

Looking forward to having a glimpse of blogging through your perspective :-)

Hello Michael,

Thank you for the warm welcome and looking forward to the exchange and the sharing of blogging experiences here.

I'm Barbara (Bee) Dieu, EFL teacher and Coordinator of the Foreign Language Dept at the Franco-Brazilian school in São Paulo, Brazil. I have been involved in international collaborative projects online since 1997 and discovered blogging end of 2002, while trying to find another webpublishing platform to host my students' newspaper online, as Highwired, the one I had been using since 1998 was closed down.

I have been blogging with my high school classes since then and have gone through various phases - from more open, to more structured and finally to more open and experiential lately combining the latest social tools like Flickr, deli.icio.us and the 43 trio. I started with Blogger but have moved to Wordpress, which is a more powerful publishing platform, allowing for static and dynamic pages.

I also co-run dekita.org, a collaborative project which aims at bringing learners together through open webpublishing and highlighting good practice.