A year of blogging

It's now a year since I first started this blog, and it's been an interesting one for sure.  I started keeping a blog as part of an effort to get my head around the use of social media, but it's starting to feed into all of my learning processes now, especially as I make extensive use of blogging as part of an online course.  So what have been the best things about keeping a blog for the past year?

Having my thoughts captured allows me to look back over the past year and how my way of thinking has changed.  After a burst of short rambling posts centring on my exploration of forums, I found some interesting things to write about, which led to some unexpected highlights:

• My summary of the Learning & Skills Group and Forward Thinking conferences drew a good deal of attention from the associated communities
• I received an entry on Janes Hart's Top 100 Articles of 2011 for a set of three of my articles

These were a real boost to my confidence in using social media generally, knowing that a wider audience would listen to my ideas, but towards the end of last year I did find myself burning out a little, something that gets referred to as social media fatigue.  Sometimes you just want to switch off from the world.  It also reflects my enthusiasm coming up sharply against the wall of reality - you can't do everything at once, and other priorities tend to get in the way.  Since then I've made an effort to write about different aspects of my learning, and I've continued to keep up blog entries within the bounds of my online course too.

Where do I go from here?  I think it's time to bring in a new personal angle on learning, which brings me to my next post...

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.

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 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

Back to the blog...

After a week on the road it's time to get back to blogging and the normal routine. Taking part in the Twitter back-channel at the Learning & Skills Group Conference was a novel experience, and I actually felt more engaged with the talks because I was actively listening out for interesting quotes to share with others.  Next task is to look for resources that people put on Twitter, and try to pull them together in one place.

This isn't as new as I thought it was...

Barely have I started writing about the use of social media for learning, when along comes a blog entry (Kelly, 2011) to highlight the point that social media and social learning aren't new and may be a little over-hyped right now.   What is important is the fact that the medium can now keep up with people, and even enhance our learning. So thanks to somebody I've never met for helping me put things in perspective and contributing to my learning (I stumbled across the link on Twitter).   This doesn't take away from my desire to understand social media for learning, rather it refocusses my attention on the key benefits that I'm aiming to get out of the medium.   First and foremost is to break the reliance on formal, structured events as the only recognised form of learning, and get some recognition for all the informal learning events that we know are taking place every day in the workplace. Second, I am hoping to increase learner engagement, and break the mindset that learning is something that is done to you, and instead promote people's ability to learn actively, both as individuals and socially.

More to come, eventually this will all distill into some kind of announcement that should get people's attention...

References:

Kelly, D., 2011.  What's 'New' About Social Media and Social Learning?  Misadventures in Learning [blog] 3 May.  Available at: <http://misadventuresinlearning.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-new-about-social-media-and-social.html> [Accessed 3 May 2011]

Learner-learner interaction

I'm starting this blog with the aim of building up ideas for best practice of using social media more in the workplace.  Forming my ideas by using a form of social media seems particularly appropriate, since I want to foster a spirit of open communication and feedback - potentially from anywhere!  My starting point for using social media more will be using the forum at work, with the goal of making it break (i.e. become unmanageable) under the sheer volume of posts, using my undestanding of Salmon's (2003) five stage model of scaffolding interactions among learners.

While I doubt that I'll get people to to the illustrious stage five (development) any time soon, I think that significant strides in interaction could be made by simply engaging people enough to motivate them to actually access the forum and post on it (which most don't as of yet), and building them up to the stage of exchanging ideas and information with each other.  Asynchronous learner-learner interaction was found to be the single most important interaction for online learning (Soo & Bonk, 1998), so I think this is a logical first step in promoting social learning in my organisation.

References:

Salmon, G., 2003.  E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning online.  2nd ed. London: Routledge-Falmer.

Soo, K-s; Bonk, C., 1998.  Interaction: What does it mean in online distance education?  In Conference proceedings Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia & World Conference on Educational Telecommunications. Frieburg Germany.  Available at: <http://eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED428724.pdf> [Accessed 01 May 2011]