The truth about blogging

Anyone who blogs regularly will have discovered several truths. The first is that you are only as good as your last post. Many people struggle to maintain a regular blog that is consistently good, or at least meaningful. The blank page and writer's block are familar companions to all authors. But there is a contradiction here. Although you are only as good as your last blog, all your previously blogs are also out there, archived, published for people to read (and for you to revisit, if you wish). So be careful what you blog - the affordance of persistency is quite a powerful one, and can work either way.

The second truth is reflected in something that Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) has expanded upon in his excellent post 'Why teachers should blog'. I quote: To blog is to teach yourself what you think. For me, this is reflexivity in action. Your work is placed right out there on the blogosphere, in a public agora for others to read, reflect on, and comment on. It's a shop window displaying your thoughts, opinions or arguments to anyone who happens to walk on by. Blogging in effect, can contribute to an endless cycle of learning through content creation, feedback, reflection and refinement of thinking. It is this kind of critical reflection cycle that can build excellent, creative, flexible and responsive educators. I have on several occasions written concerning the reasons I blog, but let me extend my argument further to all of my writing efforts, paper and online:

I write because in the act of writing, I am written. In Daniel Chandler's terms, it is about constructing meaning, discovering and drawing out your internal thoughts, and externalising them in prose. He says: "The experience of ‘discovery’ in writing may sometimes represent having found a way to make one’s ideas coherent." In effect, as I write, I create concrete meaning from my abstract thoughts. Also, because the blog is public, I write for an audience. My writing has become a social act. As I learn my thoughts, I share them with you.

A third truth, deriving from my previous statement, is this: Writing on blogs is dialogical, much more so that it ever could have been in paper format. In some journals there is occasionally a dialogue between two experts, who each write a treatise in response to the arguments of the other. This kind of dialogue is as far removed from the debate as it is possible to get without disengaging totally. Far more immediate is the dialogue that can transpire between two or more protagonists when they are simultaneously online, and using the basis of a blog post to argue. This kind of dialectical process most closely resembles the debate, and synthesis of ideas can occur more quickly for those who are engaged. Even the lurkers, those who participate peripherally or merely observe, can gain from the experience of reading the content of the comments boxes.

So there are many reasons to blog, and even more reasons to blog regularly, especially if you are in the business of education.

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The truth about blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.