In their contribution titled "Navigating Personal Information Repositories with Weblog Authoring and Concept Mapping", Sebastian Fiedler and Priya Sharma describe the tool "Weblog authoring". It enables the user to represent information spontaneously and to maintain it in personal repositories, as well as to generate a social network and collective information filtering and routing. The authors indicate how the structure and practices of Weblog authoring support the construction of a personal repository of information, as well as the ability to engage in shared dialogue about artefacts. They point out the possibility and the benefits of using concept mapping to make sense of the Weblog representations. In this respect, they make use of a technique of knowledge visualization to handle a problem of information visualizations, which is a good example of how to integrate both perspectives in a synergistic approach.

The advent of the Web and the information economy has changed the requirements for learning in the workplace and higher education. To deal with ill-structured, amorphous information, learners need to become self-organized learners capable of identifying both content and process of own learning. Engagement in the learning conversations of self-organized learning requires methods for representing information spontaneously as well as organizing information within a meaningful structure. In this chapter, we identify the role of the emerging practices of Weblog authoring and concept mapping in supporting knowledge construction and meaning-making in amorphous domains. We indicate how the structure and practices of Weblog authoring support construction of a personal repository of information as well as ability to engage in shared dialogue about artifacts. We then identify the facilitatory role of concept mapping in organizing knowledge, and conclude with suggestions for visual mapping tools to support seamless integration of information archival and mapping.