Apostolos Koutropoulos asks whether blogging or participation in discussion forums is preferable for participants in a MOOC. But since it’s a while since I participated in any course with him I would not have seen his question (or other stuff he has written in the interim) if it had been locked away in a course-specific discussion forum.
My own preference (expressed in CCK11) is for people to use open searchable/feedable channels for public or semi-public communication with trackback/pingback to enable the following of conversational threads where everyone is in control of access to their own content.
Unfortunately, take-up of this idea seems to be hampered by a perception that it is harder than it is, and the number of active independent voices is swamped by those who choose closed and limited systems like Facebook and LinkedIn.
But I am not ready to give up yet. And in the meantime am quite happy here talking to myself.