I’ve been busy training face-to-face this summer, which has resulted in something of a slow down in posting to this blog. As I noted on twitter* the other night, “the more I contribute face-to-face, the less I contribute online.” I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.
I have, however, been inspired by recent face-to-face experiences and I have more to write than I’ll ever get around to. Still, I hope to have some posts up in coming weeks (especially when things slow down for me in September) about such things as: my experience filming another video with the Orange County Department of Education (complete with teleprompters – and is that a 21st century skill? Or has it’s time come and gone?), my experience leading an intro to Tablet PC workshop after a year with a pilot project, and my experiences leading Blogging workshops… in Blackboard.
Now, strangely, when I find myself with an evening free to blog (Eva’s at a cooking class and I have no workshop tomorrow – though I’ll be back to working on Walden, CUE, and catching up at my desk), instead of jumping in and writing posts, my RSS feeds are pulling me away. I’ll never get through the 1200+ posts in my aggregator (even skimming them) at this rate. I keep commenting on blogs and contributing to wikis. But it feels good. I’ve always felt a little inadequate compared to some edubloggers who seem to comment and contribute all over creation. I think there’s a lot to say for contributing to other’s work and leaving comments (other than trackbacks from your own blog). And of course, wikis don’t work without contributors.
Obviously, the pull of the blog has brought me back for this on-the-fly reflective post. I suppose it’s yet another example of the quintessential blogging process. Will would say that true blogging begins with reading something, includes a period of processing the input, and only then moves on to writing about it and sharing it online. I’ve been expanding on this blogging process in my workshops lately with this model…
The Blogging Process
- Read (Or Do)
- Reflect
- Write
- Respond (Giving and Receiving Comments)
Does this capture the process? I’d be interested to hear reactions to this. Am I missing part of the blogging experience? Or have I included too much? Or, more likely, has this articulated better elsewhere?
In any case, I feel this post has now made some sort of contribution, however small, so it passes the “should I post this?” test. For what it’s worth, when I talk about “Better Blogging” now, I stress making a contribution. I also stress making connections. Hopefully my commenting elsewhere is doing the later – and I can always hope others will comment here. Thus the inviting questions. ;)
*Incidentally, my twittering hasn’t slowed down much since I picked it up in June – arguably some of my blogging time has now gone to that, and I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. I have a smaller audience there, but it’s certainly high impact. Follow along if you’re interested… and starting tweeting yourself if you’re not already. :)
PS: I’ve added my twitter badge to the side column of this site so that casual web visitors can see what I’m up to (if they’re interested). It’s slow loading tonight, but twitter did announce that it was napping…