To blog or not to blog...

Reflections on blogging.

 

I like talking. I’m a sociable kind of person. I think I’m entertaining (the more you drink, the more entertaining I get). I’m ‘intrapersonal-smart’, so want to entertain and help others. I’m ‘interpersonal-smart’, so I’m interested in other people’s views of what I have to say. I’m linguistic-, logical- and visually-smart too, so all these (subjective) multiple intelligences of mine should point to the fact that I like blogging. I do. I hope you like me blogging too. If you do, please comment, or “follow” me. There are simple tick-box options to ‘rate’ my posts too: “interesting”, “funny” or ‘boring as…”. Please use them. Why?

Why “rate” my posts? Because I like gold stars. I like acknowledgement, appreciation, recognition and feed-back, and writing interesting posts gets gold stars. I’m like a little puppy, trying to be cute, adorable and entertaining. A little Pavlovian I know, and not just the canine reference, but in terms of measurable behaviour and positive reinforcement.



Is blogging for everyone? No. To reflect on fellow students (or bring to mind my potential pupils of tomorrow), I know that not all of them are as comfortable blogging as I am. Whilst I’d never blogged before, per se, I have previous (positive) experience of posting on Facebook, for example, and whilst travelling I used to publish a travelogue, albeit by email and distribution lists, rather than these new-fangled blog contraptions. So, whilst I was a little apprehensive about the new (to me) technology I was to use, I wasn’t nervous of the concept. Some of my fellow learners were. Some aren’t particularly au fait with computers, some just can’t type very well, others couldn’t understand what they were supposed to be doing and, most importantly to some of them, why we had to do it (“To make ‘meaning’ means to make sense of an experience”, Mezirow, 1990, “Fostering Critical Reflection In Adulthood”).  This points to a diversity amongst learners, even learners with a similar background, or education (i.e. mature learners with at least one degree in something). For me, blogging has been a cognitive learning experience, as I’ve brought relevant knowledge with me. Not so for all.

Disparity of declarative knowledge aside, blogging can be highly personal (although it doesn’t have to be). You’re putting yourself and your thoughts out to air and anyone can look at them and comment on them. I am a confident person. I know some people will agree with my thoughts and some people won’t. As in life, some will like me, some won’t. I’m the type of person that’d prefers having people either like me or not, rather than going through life without anyone knowing I was there. Many people aren’t like me; many people are more shy and reluctant. Some learners don’t want their teachers (or perhaps, more pertinently, those assessing them) to see their learning journey, their mistakes, their foibles, even if they all come good at the end. It’s as Sir Ken Robinson says, a fear of being wrong leads to a curbing of creativity. You “can’t be creative if you’re worried about being wrong” (2006, TED lecture), or being seen to be wrong.


Another example of diversity amongst learners is access to technology, both to date, which affects their current state of cognition and declarative knowledge, and in practical terms today: what access they have to investigate the use of ICTs.  “[S]ocioeconomic status [is] among the factors that influence the knowledge and experience children bring to the classroom. This diversity…affects the kinds of support [learners] need”, Duschl, Schweingruber & Shouse, Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007).  It’s not just financial though, social groups are relevant: “diversity of learners in the classroom is increased by ICT use in social groups” (Thrupp 2010). I nearly fell off my chair in the lecture theatre at Res School when I overheard one student whisper to another “I really do think I’m going to finally have to buy a computer”. Others, particularly in more rural areas, had less than ideal internet access.

I am not overly concerned with privacy, with people seeing my posts (quite the contrary, as we’ve seen). The web is so big, how can anyone out there who isn’t connected to me have time to be that interested in what I’m doing (or naked photos of me)? Some of my cohorts expressed sincere concerns over privacy issues (“We have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit our preconceptions, labeling those ideas as unworthy of consideration—aberrations, nonsense, irrelevant, weird, or mistaken”, Mezirow, 1996,Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice) some for personal reasons, some for ‘professional’ reasons. Those that are not happy on Facebook are unlikely to be comfortable bloggers (another example of diversity in classroom: private individuals and us show-offs). Some learners are not happy to share their ideas (or their hard work) with others, for fear that others might steal or copy. These latter learners are obviously confident that they have the right answers! I’m happy for people to read my ideas and I hope my ideas help them, just as I hope their blogs and ideas help me. This is collaborative constructivity in action, albeit informal (and albeit involuntary for some!). We constructed our blogs, we got to see others’ and we shared learning, if we had time.


Are these private learners simply less altruistic? Once informed that there is no “bell curve” marking (although there may end up being a bell curve of results), why worry if people copy you? We are studying to become teachers after all. Can’t we start by helping our cohorts? Besides, it’s not enough just to read and understand others’ posts, to excel readers need to analyse, evaluate and create - to become higher order thinkers (Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy). If they’re not HOT, then is reading my blog really going to help them learn, or are they just cheating themselves?


It reminds me of the swotty kid in the classroom when we were young, covering their school work so that no others could see. Hmmm. Come to think of it, that swotty kid was probably me. Nowadays, aside from the behavioural aspects of wanting people to comment (positively) mentioned above, I see a real benefit in collaborative learning (it’s often less painful learning from other people’s mistakes ;o). If I receive feedback on my blog posts that is challenging, this helps me to learn too, perhaps to look at my posts from a different perspective – “the collective being always larger than the total sum of individual” (Vygotsky cited by Hua Liu, International Education Journal, 2005, "Vygotsky’s philosophy: Constructivism and its criticisms examined”. 


With the increasing use of initials (it’s not an acronym unless it forms another word, Rickie) it’s easy to forget the emphasis and importance of some abbreviations. I.C.T. The C stands for communication. It’s easy to forget. People often think technology is a synonym. It’s not. Information Technologies that enable us to Communicate (and Connect). On day one there weren’t many of us on this course who knew many (any?) of the answers, but given some scaffolding, given the resources and signposts to find our way we can connect with other resources, examples, peers and experts to construct our knowledge on our own cognitive basis and that is knowledge that we own, we created it. That’s a lot to learn in one week. That’s HOT.