making research public - making knowledge claims

I have been thinking lately of the potential for blogging to open up alternative discursive spaces for research groups - I realise that this is not a new thought, and I haven't really looked around at any examples, but I realise they exist. I meet with my research partner last week re: this project about professional learning and portfolio assessment al la the VIT, and we got talking about all sorts of stuff - I raised the possibility of using blogs to help make the research process an open and collaborative one, where we record the comings, goings, musings, thoughts, initial writing and whatever else, online for all to see. I'm thinking that this would give the research a chance to form and take shape in a very different way - and I think, a much more interesting way. For all our talk about professional learning and collaboration, we often ignore the professional learning opportunities inherent in any research process - for both researcher and participants (or researchers and 'co-researchers').

The idea of blogging the process of the research (as much as the product), I think is equally as valuable.

It seems that the MS monolith is thinking of turning this idea into a product ... this is Bill Gates' latest speech to the MS faithful, via the age. I'm not exactly sure what he has in mind, but I'm sure it will be ... interesting.

"Email is not without its problems. Certainly spam is the most visible of those, and email suffers when you have lots of people collaborating and different attachments going back and forth. And the creation of this idea that whenever you want to work with somebody, you just create a website - called a SharePoint website - that's been very explosive in the past year as we've built that more into Office. "