This site also includes several weblogs written by KnowNetters, where you will also find discussion threads and - we hope - some provocative writing you may want to respond to. The weblogs are based on the weblogging system KnowNet has created for Plone sites: knotes. Please note that literally all of our active discussion topics are now to be found in our main weblogs.

• Knotations - Mike Malloch's technical weblog, for documenting, noting and annotating technical and development issues.
• The Wales-Wide Web - Graham Attwell's weblog, for noting and discussing issues in online learning and knowledge development, politics and life
• elearning2.0 - Mike Malloch's main weblog (infrequent posts with 'real' writing).
• elearning2.0 - LinkLog - daily digest from Mike Malloch's del.icio.us and other bookmarking (very frequent posts noting and categorising other links).

All the content in this site is 'trackback aware'. If you have a weblog, you can comment on our content within your blog, and this site's content will link to your blog entry. If you use knotes' discussion system for discussions, and add a link to a piece of content here, the link will be two-way.

The Discussion Forums area will contain general online discussion topics on subjects of interest to members of this site. There are many other ways to create discussions in our site: web-logs, discussion documents, 'team-tasks', trackbacks etc. We will also be adding particular discussion items within the content of the site; these are indicated by the icon within the content.

The Discussion Documents area contains document-centred discussion seeded with items of short discursive content. KnowNet's discussion system, KNDiscussion, makes it easy to add discussion topics to any kind of content. 'Discussion Documents' are just ordinary SiteContent items which have been broken up into sections with discussion topics attached to them. We will be adding documents to this area occasionally. A discussion document on the new features we have been working on is in there now.

Like many others, we have found that discussion forums and groupware conferences in themselves are often too structurally homogeneous to suit some purposes, in particular where some set of goals is being addressed. They tend to be too empty to entice when new, and too full to scan after a bit of traffic, with a 'sweet spot' of transparency and activity in the middle. One of the ways in which we have tried to address this problem is the 'team-task'. Team Tasks are time-limited, goal-directed discussions in which there is a seed of provocative content to get things going and keep things semantically, rather than hierarchically, organised. Resources developed during the discussion are explicitly collected and flagged. We have found team-tasks to be very useful when a smallish group of people needs to collaborate online to get some content written or to explore some issue.

Latest: We have just spent a few days updating and refining the functionality-suite we can make available for team-tasks. This now includes group weblogs and aggregated discussions and resources. We are only just beginning to explore team-tasks in anger; you can find an example, Analytical Studies: People in elearning , at one of the community sites KnowNet is developing, sme-learning.