Blog 2.0

I've been having a think about the emphasis of my blog and my motivation for using it, and decided it's time for an overhaul and to refocus my reflections.  Whilst I started this as a foray into social media, this stems from a wider interest in all things to do with online learning.  I'm suffering from a little social media fatigue, perhaps due to a deliberate attempt to fully immerse myelf in the medium to better understand it.  Whilst I've learned a lot from the experience, and about myself and my learning preferences, it has to be part of the bigger picture.

I'm studying education to complement my role at work, and I've come across the idea that social presence is needed for effective learning to take place, online or offline.  We cannot learn effectively in complete isolation, we have to contextualise the learning.  For much of my life I tended towards being a solitary learner, and I think I suffered from having insufficient experience to develop my learning into professional expertise, and also had no safety net when things didn't work according to plan.  With my current studies, I'm able to relate pretty much everything to my professional practice, accessing course materials and continuing online discussions in the workplace where this furthers business goals, and shaping course projects around the needs of our business.  Reintegrating work and learning in this way is a win-win situation for me and my employer, because I'm boosting my own learning and contributing directly to departmental objectives.  My reflections from this point will look more generally at my experiences with online learning, and will also be a foundation for my Masters dissertation.

Social media fatigue

Well I've heard people talking about this before, but not experienced it for myself, until now.  After attending a conference a while back, I've been actively exploring the use of social media, particularly in terms of learner engagement, and the extended interactions you can achieve with the medium.  It's all well and good, but after getting myself thoroughly immersed in the medium, and finding out so many useful facts, there's a certain nagging doubt creeping in.

What's in it for me, anyway?

 

 

We should all be asking ouselves this question, because once the novelty of the medium wears off, it's easy to get bored and disengage.  I've tracked my Klout score for a while now to see how my interactions affect my score, but I'm getting pretty disillusioned, particularly after I've been taking part in chats, getting mentioned, retweeted and favourited, but yet my score gets slashed 8 points in a day.  And people are warning of how your score can slump massively if you take time out.

 

 

Well I got into using social media to interact with people, not numbers and data.  If my interactions with people aren't meaningful, then what's the point?  So I'm taking a week out, turning on the metaphorical 'out of office' for Twitter (though doubtless someone's already got an app for that...) and I don't give a hoot what happens to my Klout score.

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question

I'm eagerly awaiting the rollout of a Web 2.0 technology at my workplace, which should hopefully encourage the more widespread adoption of social media, or at least that's the theory...  Thanks to the efforts of one of my colleagues, there are a fair few executive blogs in place now, which do get read by a substantial portion of employees, and even get comments as well.  The question has moved on from whether we should keep blogs or not - as Steve Radick has pointed out, what once made the social media 'ninjas' stand out is already becoming old hat, something we're expected to do as a matter of course.

So what else is there to talk about?  The most important thing now is to take ownership of what you write.  Blogs need to go beyond the self-promotion device that many seem to regard them as, they are a tool for people to use for their own reflections as part of the experiential learning cycle, and to help shape their destiny if they draw on those reflections well.  How much do the blogs you read make use of this powerful facet of learning?  And are you doing it yourself - online or offline?

How Social Media has changed the way I think & learn (Part 4)

Wikis

My first contact with wikis was, as for many people I suspect, through Wikipedia. As a child I remember browsing through encyclopedias, soaking up information as I was want to do, so here was an interesting concept, in that it was all online, and that you could actually edit it for yourself. Now I remember all the protests at the time, that because anyone could write and edit articles it would all be rubbish and full of inacuracies, but then I guess that depends on who is writing it, and whether you have the good judgement to question what's there anyway. I liked the idea enough that I would occasionally refer to it and make my own mind up, and also started to use it as a kind of news feed through the current events section and the featured articles for something different to read. Later I started putting in small additions and even new sections when I felt moved to do so, and I actually regard it as being highly educational because I am able to engage more powerfully with the material this way.

I read Clive Shepherd's recent blog post where he questions whether a book is method or medium, and I agree that moving books to electronic format is the same method for a different medium, but the wiki does go a step beyond, because it's a uniquely collaborative venture. Instead of regarding knowledge as fixed and exclusively in the hands of 'better people', it is now in our hands. Is that a good thing? Depends on the judgement we use, or don't use! If our judgement is bad, so our wiki will be bad, and the results should alert us to this fact. So if you like what Wikipedia has done, take ownership, and get on board with the discussions if you disagree with something. Because we can all become 'better people' by increasing our knowledge.

Click here for Part 3

How Social Media has changed the way I think & learn (Part 3)

Forums

Last October I started my Masters degree (MEd) with the University of Hull, done entirely online. Seems fitting, especially as the subject was in fact online learning! I thought I knew quite a lot about the subject from producing on-demand software tutorials and briefing modules for examiners, and I was expecting the course to build on that, which it did. What I wasn't prepared for was the ongoing, subtle change in the way that I interacted with the other people on the course.

Because the majority of interaction between me and my fellow students took place through an online forum, the nature of our communication took on a unique property which allowed us to have conversations over time - 'asynchronous' is the proper term. Whilst human beings have been doing this through letters for centuries, having all the messages channelled through a central forum allowed for a strange hybrid form of communication, somewhere between normal written correspondance and a real time conversation. I've often found myself losing my place in a conversation because I'm trying to think of a meaningful, considered response to someone - but by then that 'thread' of the conversation is lost because people have moved on. Not so with a forum.

Communicating in this way has allowed me to get the best of both worlds: interaction with many people, and the chance to consider my responses. No, wait, it's actually more than the sum of its parts, because I get an extra synergy from talking to people this way, and that's the ability to change my attitude. This way I can learn from my mistakes without the usual embarassment that I might feel in a social setting. If anything I've become more willing to dare to express controversial opinions, because the ethos of the medium does seem to encourage experiential learning. No more 'drill and fill' for me thank you very much!

So, in short, I've gone from being a solitary learner to a social one, and because I can take my attitude with me wherever I go, that new behaviour can translate to the face-to-face setting as well.

 

Click here for Part 2          Click here for Part 4

Watch your language on Twitter!

Here's a little tale of a lesson I've learned lately about using Twitter.

Over the last couple of months I've been getting to grips with this new medium, and I'd been thinking about whether or not I should follow people back when they follow me. Eventually I decided to take Ted Coine's advice about following everyone back, looking on it as a social courtesy. But last week something a little unusual happened. My number of followers pretty much doubled over the space of a few days - all well and good, and I did the 'good thing' in return and followed them back.

So what's the problem?

They were all from South Korea, and quite naturally their tweets were in Korean.

Now as much as I like the idea of having a truly international audience for my tweets, logging in to my Twitter feed and not being able to understand a large portion of it is a little alarming! Sure, there are tools to channel your feed, which I'm going to start looking in to, but should they be the first port of call for making any sense of what's on there? And am I going to start learning different languages just to understand it all anyway? Probably not!

So to any folks in South Korea who are reading this, don't take it personally if I do unfollow you. You'll still be able to hear what I have to say, and my extension of courtesy will be to make sure I'm talking about something that has value.

How Social Media has changed the way I think & learn (Part 2)

My last post was about micro-blogging, so now I'll extend that to...

Blogging

Keeping a public blog has been a very positive move for building my self-awareness, and overcoming some of my own limitations in communicating. As an introvert, I normally have an awful lot of deep thoughts running through my head that I'm not able to share coherently with others, especially in crowded social situations. Suddenly I have a tool to put them into print, whilst I'm alone and relaxed, then share them with anyone who cares to listen - and apparently a fair few people have started to listen already. Knowing that I can reach out to people this way gives me a new found sense of confidence in communicating with others. I don't mind saying I've wrestled with depression in the past, I think primarily because of frustrations in this area, and an imposed sense of there being 'something wrong with me' because I didn't fit in with the crowd. Now I've managed to find a place to speak my mind freely in a way I didn't know existed. Because most importantly of all, I've not followed any rules for how my blog should be set up - just some really good advice.

There's also a real professional benefit to blogging. I'm naturally disposed to reflecting on my experiences - good or bad - with a view to continuously improving myself. According to Schön (1983), this is one of the defining characteristics of professional practice. I have been able to enhance and extend this process through completing critical reflection assignments for my Masters course. Keeping a blog to summarise my experiences as I go along has been an essential tool in keeping track of everything I learn, much of which could easily be taken for granted after the event. Further to this I'm also conscious that other people may be reading my blog, and the essay that I draw from it, so I'm motivated to keep it coherent and relevant. So my blog actually becomes a powerful aid to my own learning and long-term memory.

Click here for Part 1          Click here for Part 3

 

References:

• Schön, D. A., 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith