To blog or not to blog…
I’m going off the conversation that was started over at NING about blogging and its relevance to e-learning (and the subject I suppose) for this post. I decided to do a bit of googling around to see if other bloggers had mentioned anything about it. Tony Karrer (who granted is really cynical, but amusingly so) posted his top ten reasons to blog and top ten reasons not to blog. Clearly the article is very biased towards the benefits of blogging but he makes good points nonetheless. He mentions in point 8 “this is how you’re going to learn in the future.” I never thought of it that way before. He quotes Stephen Downes, who says
This is the difference represented in the shift from traditional classroom based learning and network learning. The idea of the latter is that learning occurs when the learner immerses him or herself in a community of practice, learning by performing authentic tasks, learning by interacting with and becoming a member of the community.
And, well, it’s true. We’re not learning by just doing our readings and writing an assignment and forgetting about it any more. Sure, that’s a part of it. I don’t know about everyone else in the class though but I’m getting more out of the application of the readings to my study community, the NING community and my day to day life, especially at work, than writing a little summary about them in an essay. And I think more importantly it’s about immersing ourselves in the culture of blogging, not just the act of blogging itself. Because blogging is a culture. But unfortunately one that I’ve never been all that good at getting my foot in the door with. Tony Karr says that blogging will allow you to form connections and have good conversations with people about what you’re learning all over the place and I’m sure that is the point of it but I’ve never really felt like I’ve managed to achieve this in any of the blogs I’ve had in the past. In fact this is the only blog I’ve had that’s ever gotten any real comments and I wonder if that’s based on what I’m writing or if it’s because we’re all in this e-learning experience together.
This web page (Steve O’Hear) briefly discusses blogging as a place for students to use as a reflective space, just to jot their thoughts down and I like that idea better but I’m not sure why. Is it because I’m more reflective than structured in my writing? I don’t know, I feel like I’m struggling with blogging at the moment. Tony Karr is right that it forces you to do your homework but at the same time I’m finding the minimum one blog post a week hard sometimes. Gina Minks (on an edublog no less!) talks about blogging as a reflective practice and the way she talks about activity is helpful. She makes a good point about actually having to use the internet technologies as well, and while this isn’t relevant to me (web developer), I wonder which is more relevant for my classmates. Are people getting more about of blogging and reflecting on what they’re reading/doing or are they getting more out of actually learning how to use the technologies we’re looking at, regardless of what they’re for? Gina Minks blogs as reflective practice for her job – I wonder if I should be doing that for my job. That said, my job is so specific and somewhat detached from the web development community at large (I develop for a custom built in-house content management system, not much of what I do is applicable elsewhere) that I don’t know if there’d be much to reflect on.
…hahaha wow, the blogging community really is small, I just noticed that mollybob posted a comment on the Gina Minks post in December. Hah! *amused*
So I guess I’m kind of reflecting on my blogging in general here and wondering if I’m doing okay with it. Am I blogging regularly enough? Are my posts reflective enough? Are they relevant? Do I need to incorporate more research? I keep looking at everyone else’s blogs to see if there’s a particular style we should be writing in, but everyone’s is different, which leads me to believe that there probably isn’t one, as such, aside from the standard blogging conventions. I dunno. It’s probably just that time of semester where I start to freak out about marks and failing all my courses. So I’m having a mid-blog-crisis (read: mid life crisis). Help!
References
Mink, G. 24 November, 2008, Blogging as Reflective Practice, viewed 20 April 2009, http://gminks.edublogs.org/2008/11/24/blogging-as-reflective-practice/
O’Hear, S. 8 August, 2006, e-learning 2.0 – how Web Technologies are shaping education, viewed 20 April 2009, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php
Karrer, T. 4 October, 2006. Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog: eLearning Technology, viewed 20 April, 2009, http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-reasons-to-blog-and-top-ten.html
