Functionalities for Blog Conversation: An Investigation about the Use of Quote and Reply

The blog is featured as a communication system for dissemination of information and expression of opinions. Is the blog a system suitable for collaboration? The research presented in this paper investigates the use of citation and response to enable a conversation on the blog. From analysis of the discourse structuring and the possibilities of relationship among participants, were developed some research questions that guided the research on the citation functionality and response functionality. To investigate the research questions, we performed a case study explanatory using the blog as a support method for Project-based Collaborative Learning. Explanatory case study, citation functionality and response functionality were varied between the stages of the dynamics so that they could observe the influence of each functionality in the conversation among students. As a result of the study, we observed that the citation functionality was hardly used by bloggers because of usability problems and the lack of culture usage and the response functionality was used moderately. There is a preference among bloggers to use the response functionality to replicate the comments received from readers. It was not possible to infer in this research whether it´s better to make available both features: the quote and the reply, only one or none (only the comment for a post).