I am not a born blogger; as a young person I would never have advertised myself like this. Indeed I am not a natural blogger; this is the first public post I have ever written and, had I not recently started work at CETIS, the first would still be in the future. Blogging is part of my job now. CETIS is walking-the-walk and, in spite of my mixed feelings about blogging, this is a good thing. How else could we possibly engage with our community on questions such as the role of blogs in teaching and learning? Mixed feelings have feelings too.
So, what kind of mixed feelings:
I worry that, while “The Web” offers the potential for broadening inclusion in some respects, some of its aspects may exclude or alientate different groups;
There is far too much noise with an overflowing of superficial trivia;
I react against post-modernism;
…
I don’t wish to promote exclusion, contribute to the drivel or encourage the post-modernists. I will come to the other mixed feelings another time and for now just reflect a little on inclusion.
(a short pause while I agonise over the use of the first person vs third person)
As I speculated on stereotypes of the blog-alientated, the private people, the dyslexic, the un-cool … my fingers reached for Google and I quickly stumbed into David Wilcox’s Designing for Civil Society blog and a post on the digital divide in the era of social software. The blog is mostly about democracy, government and participation bu t David’s analysis really fits with where we are in teaching and learning and the above post offers a number of assertions that could be usefully debated in and around the CETIS community.
Yet still I wonder whether you need to be sociable to be included.
Hi Adam
I’ve bewn going through similar thoughts about what blogs are all about, who blogs, the dangers of blogging, etc, etc.
I’m getting round to thinking about the various purposes of blogging:
o Dissemination
o Engament (‘having a conversation’)
o Reflection (‘I think xxx – and I’d better write it down or I’ll forget’)
o Reviewing by one’s peers (‘I noticed you said xxx – however I think yyy is better’)
I’ve started to blog about such issues – e.g. see my
policies for this blog posting.
I’d also suggest that blogs can be private – it’s an application which is better than MS Word for making notes. So you don’t have to be social to use social networking software such as blogs, IMHO.
Brian