Blogs that live a story?

I’m participating in the KnowSchools course on blogging this week and so taking the time to read and comment on various blogs where I came across Lisa Read’s comment on blogging:

I’d used a blog in the past to tell a story, but this blog is more about living the story.

This is great food for thought. When is a blog telling a story and when is it living the story? What’s the difference? I’d love to hear other thoughts on this.

Blogging as a working journal?

I went today to hear Maurice Gibbons speak at SFU on Keeping a Working Journal. Maurice is considered the “father” of self directed learning in Field Programs and it was hearing him speak on Self-Directed Learning at a mentor conference in October 2006 that was a part of my decision to apply to work at SFU. In short, I liked what Dr. Gibbons had to say about learning and the role of education and institutions in supporting learning. Similarly, today I found his presentation on Working Journals thought provoking and inspiring.

Journals can take many forms and serve a variety of purposes. They can take a diary form to record events or for personal or spiritual growth. A working journal though, according to Gibbons serves to support intellectual growth. For him, it is about collecting, organizing, examining and creating ideas. Gibbons showed examples from his own and other working journals and they were indeed inspiring. As I watched and listened I was struck by two thoughts.

First, Gibbons uses a plain paper journal. This he claims helps with to encourage more visual representation of ideas. This made me wonder about my own tendency to be verbal, to write ideas rather than draw them out. How might my thinking change if my next journal is plain paper instead of the lined books I’m drawn to?

Second, I wondered how Gibbons’ world of ideas would change if he were using a blog for his journal. While he touched on this briefly, talking about how someone he knows blogs regularly and uses the blog to connect with others interested in writing, I sensed that he was not really aware of the power of blogging in terms of linking to the ideas and creativity of others. To be honest, from my own experience with blogging over several years now, this is only something that I am now really coming to understand.

In the past week Dave Truss has come out to work with two of my TLITE groups and through his presentations I have learned even more. To the Coqutilam group Dave talked about his experiences with building learning communities, in Abbotsford, what he’s learned from blogging. Through both presentations Dave pushed us all to realize the power of the internet, the connections, the larger, very real community and the immense potential, particularly the potential in education. Both times he showed the following video which he put together for a Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Coference in Boston.

A Brave New World-Wide-Web by Dave Truss

I definitely have more to say on all this because so far I’ve really just used this post very much as a working journal. I’ve thrown out a lot of ideas, about working journals as a place to work with ideas, the potential of using a blog as a working journal to add in the element of connecting with others around those perhaps not yet well formed ideas, and the power of that connection particularly for education. But I haven’t formed them well. I’m not finished… but hey, that’s what working journals are supposed to be about.

More to come….

Blogging

I’ve taken a break from writing/posting over the past few months. There was just always so much to do and never enough time to reflect in any kind of worthwhile manner, or at least in any sort of public way. Looking back now I know that it was partly a lapse in my own confidence, and partly just normal life and work getting in the way of my time to take blogging seriously. But I’m back after some real consideration as to why do it at all?

I have to admit that blogging holds a certain fascination for me, not just my experimenting with “daring” to post my own blogs, but learning to spend at least as much time reading and following other blogs. It is really a kind of special phenomenon; not unlike a magical kind of “putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the sea”. I could be writing this and sending it out where anyone could read it but no one ever will. But the magic is that it just doesn’t happen that way with blogging. I throw out my note in a bottle but while I’m out at the oceanside, I pick up four or five others. I read those, find a few interesting ideas, people I want to connect with. I send them back their bottles and still others find them. Meanwhile I’m inspired to create more notes in more bottles of my own. The whole process creates a wonderful web of connections in a very new and exciting way.

Just this summer I heard the story of Allan November meeting Dave Truss for the first time. They got to talking when Allan realized that Dave was the author of the Pair-a-dimes blog, a blog Allan had already been following. And Dave of course, was similarly reading Allan’s blog. Without ever having met before, they were already connected and able to find ways to work together.

This ability to make connections through our writing and the ideas in our writing is very powerful. Consider it in the school context. Students can set up blogs and write on topics or issues that they are learning about. The blogs can be designed to protect the students identity but yet the site can still be in the public realm so that the students have an authentic audience.

Then add in Google Alerts and the possibility that students will draw in an audience of people who watch or follow their issues. So for example, if I set up a google alert for “Naomi Klein”, when a blogger somewhere in the world makes a reference to her, I receive an email. So I check out the blog and may be able to comment on that bloggers viewpoint regarding Naomi Klein. Or, by setting up a google alert for myself, likewise I can find reference that my students make to my comments or actions. Recently, for example, I found reference to Peter Scott’s blog through google alerts and so was able to add my thoughts to his blog regarding something I’d done and his field study work.  Powerful tools for powerful learning.