Common Questions and Some Thoughts Around Blogs and Blogging

I've had a brief blog conversation with Quintus Joubert - eLearning Blog: Blogs: Engaging the reader. It started when he questioned the blogs cited on Gabe's list of top 19 eLearning blogs as (eLearning Blog: Top 19 eLearning blogs).

His post are good to look at as an example of some of the common questions that people new to the world of blogs have. I thought it was a great spark for some discussion:

Why do "the blogs look like a random collection of ideas, rather than a discussion around a particular topic"?

I think that one thing a lot of people miss at first is that most blogs are really an on-going conversation that the blogger is having with other people in the blogosphere. It's not unlike a conversation you would have at conference in that it covers all sorts of topics. Most people who write blogs do not feel they are "publishing" or "presenting" ... instead they are conversing.

Why do they sometimes include things about their personal life?

Just like any conversation, some people are going to include more stuff about their personal life, some people less. Readers are likely the same. Some people (like me) skip most personal stuff (unless I know them pretty well).

"How to do share your thoughts/lessons learnt without seeming to be the expert"?

Great question. And the answer is that you are free to express your opinions and you should help people by saying they are opinions (but we know that's almost always true already). What I look to get from blogs is lots of perspectives. Personal perspectives.

Why aren't there "more substantial discussion" of the "big issues facing eLearning"?

In some ways, I have the same question, but partly I've come to realize that the the big issues are not well defined. That's also where personal perspectives and personal challenges come in. If you look at the LCB Big Question in December, it's a great exercise because it forces you to define your challenges.

Interestingly, he later said ...

"blogs are about sharing best practices, lessons learned and learning from others"

We agree on this!

But he also said ...

"the main challenge with blogs is to make them entertaining while at the same time sharing something that may be beneficial to a participant in the eLearning industry"

Actually, making it "entertaining" is not really what you are normally going for. Are you trying to be entertaining when you are talking to someone. Not normally.

Finally he says ...

I have noticed that many of the current corporate/business blogs try to cover all the bases i.e. covering news, books, tools, articles, best practices, personal news etc. Sometimes this comes across as a little disorganized and it is hard to filter through all the information to get to the meat. Although I like the idea of a blog, I am not sure that it will be that helpful to people unless there is some sort of structure. A collection of unassociated thoughts and ideas is great if you have a lot of time to filter through the posts, but most people don’t have the time to do this. I guess my struggle at the moment is to come to grips with the blogging format and trying to decide what value I can provide to my audience. The ultimate value of a blog is to get people to engage with you and to share their ideas, rather than it being a static medium. I would love to have your thoughts on how you managed to achieve this.

Fantastic! Yes, blogs are disorganized. Conversations are disorganized.

How do you filter? Lots of ways. Skim quickly to look for interesting things. Use aggregators (human or automatted) who are scanning lots of sources and giving you what they deem relevant.

Overall, I think the expectation about blogging and blogs is way to high from Quintus' viewpoint. If you think of them in terms of "entertainment", "audience", "value I can provide" ... that's way too much pressure. Instead, think of it as conversation and tell us about:

• Your biggest challenges in eLearning?
• A recent problem you've faced?
• A meeting you went to and what you ran into?
• Or "speed dating" at a business function (which he did)?

Five Things Meme

Wendy started her Five Things Meme post with a comment that resonated with me:

I'll admit I am not a huge fan of chain letters or tagging games.

Then at the end she tags me. That doesn't seem right does it? Of course, it's kinda like hazing, because I'm going to do the same thing...

Okay, so five things you may or may not know about me:

1. I'm 6'6" tall and play beach volleyball at least twice a week (Manhattan Beach, California) and still have a AA (triple is highest)), but am trying to lose it so I can start playing tournaments with my kids.

2. I have 3 kids, daughter-12, son-9, son-6. They are a LOT of fun. And they get a lot of beach time as well!

3. I was on the golf team in college and at one time held my home course (China Lake Golf Course) record of 7-under, 65. I had a +2 handicap at the time (they added strokes to my score) ... which seems a bit unfair. But, in comparison to some of the other people I played against in college such as Duffy Waldorf ... I wasn't very good. Man those guys are good.

4. I like to play video/computer games (since I was a kid). Currently I'm playing quite a bit of Civilization 4 and some Wii Tennis on the game at work. The Wii is pretty fun game play.

5. I yell positive encouragement way too much when I go to my kids soccer and baseball games.

Yikes - I sense a theme in these. Must be the time of year.

In terms of tagging - I'm not sure who's already gone through this ... I apologize for continuing the pain ... hehehehe ... you see after you've been hazed, you ... well, you know ...

Dave Lee
Donald Clark
Dave Boggs
Brent Schlenker
Clive Sheppard
Jim Belshaw
mark oehlert

Making the Change Happen

Two great posts:

• Changing is The Work
• Too Much Talk, Not Enough Action: But What To Do?

I'll be curious to see the reaction.

More on Changes to ISD, ADDIE, HPT

Interesting blog discussion going on that relates back to LCB's November Big Question (you can find my earlier summation).

Part of the discussion is Where Will the Change Come From? and reading the comments on the post: If You Believe It's Broken - How Do You Change Our Industry/Models/etc? is interesting. As is Tom's post: Providing a change model. But, Tom is way off when he says:

I found that software developers have a change model in mind for the widespread
adoption of Web 2.0 tools. They think it will never happen.

Quite the contrary is true. Web 2.0 is having a fundamental effect on software development and software developers are in the same state as ID folks. Trying to cope with a rapidly changing technical landscape with all kinds of new requirements.

Even after reading what Mark, Karl and Tom had to say about the possible role of academia, I still feel like we shouldn't expect academia to lead the charge until we (a) experiment with different models, and (b) begin to identify patterns that work.

As a side note: in a world of blogs with rapid discourse, it's quite interesting that the guru's seem silent in comparison. In my earlier blog post, I mentioned Allison Rossett and Ruth Clark. My guess is that no one has heard from them. If you look at comments in Where Will the Change Come From? - I think there's some thinking that the guru's are going to be laggards.

Maybe that's why You are the Person of the Year!

Blogging to Peak in 2007?

I received a great set of questions via email over the weekend roughly coming out of a two articles: Gartner: Blogging to peak in 2007 , By Some Measures, Blogging May Be Peaking.

The questions:

Do you feel that Gartner's prediction will apply to educators in general? By end of 2007, will those educators who would ever dabble in blogging have dabbled? And if so, where will that leave blogging as a tool for education? Will it only be used by educators that have kept up blogging. Or alternatively, do you think that educators will buck the trend that Gartner predicts?

So, let me first say that when you say educators, I generally am thinking of academia and I really don't know that space as well as folks like Stephen Downes and David Warlick. Also, there's been some commentary on this already in the edublog space: Blogs are a waste of time - no-one blogging by 2010? (But I happen to disagree with a lot of what they are saying.)

That said, I'll still put out my opinions (and that's all they are).

I think that Gartner's statement is a bit too soon - the number of pure play blogs will continue to grow over the next few years and daily posts will as well. And, more importantly, there will be incredible growth in tools that are not purely blogs. So, if you change the question to, will writing and sharing online going to increase? Dramatically! The form of it may or may not be a blog.

Would you call posting notes about assignments, pointers to resources by an elementary teacher to be blogging? I'm not sure if that counts as blogging, but that's going to continue to increase - right now only about half of the elementary teachers for my kids do this to any great extent. It is EXTREMELY useful to be able to communicate to parents though this kind of mechanism.

Further, teachers will be able to share resources and lesson plans - which is something my mother (a second grade teacher for 30+ years) would have done. And I would certainly have put all of my class notes in a wiki. It all makes way too much sense. I don't think that Gartner counts this as blogging though.

Let's add to this mix the ability to share slides, videos, podcasts. Gee, I wonder if that might have some pick-up?

And, of course, there's stuff like MySpace which again may not technically count as blogging even though it's personal journaling and commenting. Social networking hasn't really got to the professional, over-25 crowd. If there was a MySpace for teachers who could exchange issues and ideas, do you think they'd use it to any great degree. In the professional world, there are lots of attempts at this and eventually we'll see slow pick-up.

The comment that "everyone who is going to dabble has already dabbled" ... suggests that you've reached full adoption. I personally don't believe this is even close to true. There are too many different networks out there that haven't yet adopted. Even in eLearning, we are in the infancy of adoption.

And, there's a built-in assumption that we are talking about blogs that are somehow "expert blogs" as opposed to personal blogs. While experts have generally been the first adopters, I believe that you are going to see more adoption by folks who want to talk about the issues they face, what they are doing, etc. and who don't consider themselves experts. They are normal professionals.

I think that we are far, far short of getting mainstream adoption of Web 2.0 social computing. So while the form of blogging may change, we are going to see greater and greater adoption!

Multiple Social Networks

Luis Suarez and Dennis McDonald have posted about the issues with the large number of social networking sites:

• Your Single Social Network - ClaimID and Identity 2.0 to the Rescue?
• Is There Such a Thing as "Social Networking Fatigue"?

In these posts they discuss the fact that with as many social networking sites (and I would add other kinds of Web 2.0 sites), there is inherent friction both with sign-up and with on-going use of multiple sites. Luis, Dennis and I (and I'm sure lots of folks) have all gone through the decision of whether to spend time signing up and using another site. The benefit of signing up is participation with that group of individuals. The disadvantage is time.

I've had several conversations recently where someone wanted me to be involved in their network and my strong suggestion was to figure out how to use my blog's RSS feed within their network so I could continue to do what I'm doing now, but allow me to open up the conversation with more people. Theoretically, this will start to happen with solutions like PeopleAggregator, but for now, there is definitely a barrier.

You are the Person of the Year!