Tony Karrer asks on the Learning Circuits Blog if all learning professionals should be blogging. Given my stand against “one size fits all” education, I’d have answer no. However, I would strongly recommend blogging to anyone in the learning profession, much as I would recommend keeping a journal or publishing an article. Blogging is just easier than the latter two. I also agree with dave lee that there are applications other than blogs that learning professionals can use to share and learn.
Stephen Downes has a well-thought response to this question:
What can you know about a profcessional who doesn’t blog his or her work? How do you know they are competent, that they have the respect of their peers, that they understand the issues, that they practice sound methodology, that they show consideration for their clients? You cannot know any of this without the openness blogging (or equivalent) provides. Which means, once a substantial number begin to share, there will be increasing pressure on all to share.
Stephen says that blogging is good for our field but perhaps the easiest sales pitch is that it has direct benefits to the individual. It is actually a time-saver in the long run. I’ve referred to blogging as a way of making implicit knowledge more explicit and as a way of personal knowledge management. Over the past few years I’ve tried to explain my own practice of PKM on this blog several times.
Finally, I would say that learning is conversation and that blogging lets you have more and better conversations.
Good point(s) well made. See my comments on Tony’s post. It’s the conversation thing that I like. I have always thrived under collaborative working conditions, so took to collaborative learning like a duck to water. Looking back over my learning-life, even off-line I always tried to make learning a conversation… much to the disgust of my teachers who wrote “talkative” and “talks too much” all over my reports.Who gets to decide how much is too much anyway? That’s what I want to know !-D
I have posted today about exploring the options for the inclusion of my blog as a learning tool in my current studies for my Master’s degree. http://karynromeis.blogspot.com/2006/10/blogs-in-learning-what-they-are-and.html
As I said in the post, I find the best medium for delivering a paper to be, well paper. But I find the requirement to submit a paper at all limiting in that it closes the conversation. I’m exploring ways of including the conversation in my submitted assignments, but have yet to put any shape to my thoughts.
Please feel free to share yours!