Personal Blogs

Fig. 1. Display of the Olympic Village, ExCel, Custom House, London Docklands. Part of a display for the 3,500 Gamesmakers who are being recruited over the next months to support the Olympics next summer.

Not blogging is for me a loss as I have always used a diary (1974-1999) and then a blog (1999-to present day) to provide a record or archive of what is hitting my head every day.

This provides, during times of reflection, the opportunity to think over events. (With a diary I might not look back at a page for a decade, but at least it was there).

I have little doubt that this is because I am between modules. Creativity, Innovation and Change (B822) kicks off in November.

Many colleagues keep a 'daily log or notebook'. I used to, but found I'd fill them too quickly. I favour IT to assist, sort, store. I will 'forget about' something in the knowledge that I can draw it from my electronic 'brain'; this of course assume that the content has made it that far. So a blog is a repository. The problem is which blog? These have a habit of splitting into multiple folders.

Nor is this blog the place for Social Media and Online Communications (my role at the Open University Business and Law School). Though at times there is considerable overlap with all that I have learnt in the Masters in Open and Distance Education. (Modules H800, H809 and H807 completed).

Nor is it the place for my potential adventures with the London Olympics 2012, which had me (like a number of OU Colleagues) attending a 'Gamesmaker' presentation and interview yesterday. I have been lined up for the Press Office, potentially to contribute to the Knowledge & Information desk which will draw in educational value from the events to share with future Olympics, otherwise either in the Olympic Village editing/writing a regular newsletter, or at one of the venues 'door-stepping' athletes and getting their words to the media centre.

My summer 'vacation' 2012

A part solution to the failure to post a blog is:

1) I took notes (directly into an iPad for the most part, so no need to transfer/transcribe)

2) I took pictures (sometimes with the iPad, now with an iPhone, such grabs of presentation slides that I immediately upload to Picasa Web. These in turn would be best placed in a photo friendly blog in WordPress, FlickR or Tumblr, though currently they are saved into locked galleries online).

3) I keep a daily log/notes of my day, aggregating content of interest from RSS Feeds (LinkedIn groups and Blogs) as well as Google Alerts. This has always remained offline. I need to get it into FileMaker Pro so that is it more searchable.

The above to provide a catalyst for developing further any one of these topics at a later date (if at all), but usually easy enough to discover if blogged (private view), or put into a relational database software package such as FileMaker Pro.

I therefore have a record of events, meetings, presentations and so on, which include:

MONDAY PR and the words of students and alumni from discussions and requests to our growing groups in LinkedIn.

TUESDAY Interviews with Alumni (three of the 1996 graduation group reflecting on their experiences of the MBA and what they have done since). Brief a TV production company.

TUESDAY Creation of a blog for Open University Business Network. Kathryn Tickell at the Stables (or was that last week ?!)

WEDNESDAY Using Camtasia, Audacity, a MAC and the Institute of Educational Technology 'Podcasting Suit' to produce a video-version (animation/movie) of a presentation I gave on Social Media in Higher Education which I wish to induct academics (or their teams) to use to compress 45 minutes lectures into scripted pieces that are more 'Web Friendly'.

WEDNESDAY Tweet inaugrual lecture of Professor Cherie Booth and the acceptance speech of Leslee Griffiths BA.

THURSDAY Personas and Mental Mapping (an OU technique to understanding and predicting visitor behaviours when using online materials)

THURSDAY Communications, Leadership and Influence (a presentation by the new Director of Communications). I took from this the need to make the time and effort to empathise with colleagues with whom I work.

THURSDAY Open University Businesss Network (a series of quarterly breaksfast briefings for local business people that started on Thursday)

THURSDAY Edit of interview visiting fellow from Ghana

This is a quote in Ian Kershaw's 'The End' (2011) of all things regarding one of many diaries he read researching the downfall of Germany in the final year of The Second World War.

It expresses for me what was or came to be an early perception of the 'online journal' (as they were called before web-log, then 'blog' came along).

I  started to put my diary online in 1999.

I even copied out passages in notebooks that went back a further 20 years. It was an online diary to begin with, even a form of publishing. It morphed into other things as readers and other regular writers emerged.

The reality of 2011 is that this blank space is whatever you want it to be and whatever others make of it: a soap box, a survey, a statement, a chapter of a book, song lyrics, snaps, charts, gobble-de-gook.

The enigma of the private diary uncovered was the sense that this was the truth, how someone thought and behaved.

Today some of us, though not in this space, chose to reveal everything we can regarding what it means to be human. There was an element of 'exposure' but this, what I read in 2000, 2001, 2002, became the appeal and attraction, particularly to many isolated, even depressed people who discovered they weren't alone.

I'm up for a while in the middle of the night preparing a Steve Jobs inspired presentation - his approach is legendary. I've had a Mac from the start, with the Apple II.

Leslee Griffiths BA Student and Business School student tells her story: http://www8.open.ac.uk/business-school/study/testimonials/leslee-griffiths

There are good reasons to encourage more people to do this, to share thoughts and ideas online, to reflect on their work, to aggregate ideas (like a portfolio), to generate and share content.

What do you think?

Why have YOU embarked on this journey?

What will motivate you to keep doing?

How about every day for a year?(the goal of us early bloggers in 1999).

P.S. And an age-appropriate photo will replace the happy Dad of 9 years ago that you currently see. Intellectually I feel like a 19 year old - fighting fit and argumentative. The way I will go down here on in.

I have never gone grey, not lost much hair, still swim a mile or more a week ... avoid the sun, but tan easily.

I do NOT need reading glasses ... but my skin, in places is starting to look like rice paper ... I'm a baby of the 60s.

Thrilled to be alive, highly mixed up in e-learning ... a century ago (like my grandfather) it would have been planes, motorbikes and cars.

About to go out and eat on an extraordinary evening on the South Downs with views across the English Channel with the three people who matter the most to me in all the world, my wife and children.

Have I done my bit?

When they emerge from university and have five years steady employment, with a partner ...

When do you let go?

Given than my mother's parents, aunts and uncles reached their 90s ...

I feel, and celebrate that we never let go.

If in 50 years time my mother and my siblings and our cousins and second cousins and our children are all still present ?

• I want to have a role in the Olympics.
• I want to have a role in remembering the First World War.
• I want to be a grandparent.
• I'd like to be by the sea and on it most days.
• I'd like people to grin with pleasure feeling they've achieved something extra-ordinary and unexpected.
• This for me is the OU.

P.P.S. I am neither jingoistic or necessarily a patriot. The above is a statement of circumstance. Those millions of us living here ought to reflect more often on how great it is to live a life in peace, with food, a roof over our heads, clothing and friends. The challenge of the next 100 years is to educate some people not to abuse it: flytipping stinks, littering is no better. There are too many people in our society who frankly don't give a monkey's +@#

I got an iPHone three weeks ago.

Today my son (13 years 3 months) loaded the Carling APP, and a fish pond.

He then showed me how to turn it off. So one of these and one of those

I do now follow various foriums with the RSS feed to my email, picking them off as the happen, responding from time to time, rather than letting them stack up.

For the second time today I did a Google search only to come back to this student blog, whilst in one respect chuffed, it doesn't help me correct the considerable volumes of nonsense that exist here.

This possibly explains the 1,000+ page views a day.

Keen to get the initials of e-learning authors/academics I put 'Hawkridge, Morgan and Jeffs', into the search engine Bing and was directed to a not very helpful student blog ... this one

Whereas Google offered the correct journal, and paper authored by these three and corrected Jeffs to Jelfs. One click and I had the paper downloaded (for the umpteenth time) as a PDF.

I don't bookmark or save documents anymore, I just Google it. Now, is this because Google is intuatively following my choices? I hotdesk between computers though, I'm on my wife's laptop now, was on my son's desk top earlier on ... while during the week I'm on my own laptop or iPad.

I guess it depends on how I am signed in. Who knows. I should (but don't).

Listen - Engage - Create Simplified to a traffic light (see below)

With the additional thought, 'you can't understand social media unless you do it'.

This IS the new TV, new Radio, new wordprocessing ...it will and is transforming the way we do things forever.

We'll have dropped the suffix 'e' with a year and the descriptors such as 'digital' sooner.

Learners should not be defined by the technology they use, whether books, TV, computers, or interactive web-content; they should be defined by the processes of myelination that is going on regardlessly, in it's most mysterious ways, under our thick skulls.

Who indeed is the 'digital scholar', an academic now an 'e-reader' in 'Enter Subject Specialisms Here'.

Some answers are offered in Martin Weller's book 'The Digital Scholar'.

My favoured observation post is to watch out for this slippery fish in the OU Student Blog Roll, more a stream of fish-fry commencing their online, 'electronically-enhanced' learning journey, than a mere list, more news feed, though refreshing from the perspective of the new, rather than the rehearsed and practises mind.

Once a fish, now a fisherman?

I have another 12 months in these waters, more if I postpone completing the MA (more by accident than design, I've not registered for the next module yet - whatever that might be).

The choices are bewildering, not least because I can drift off to do something with a different Faculty.

Part of the brilliance of The OU to enable such choices. Creativity and Innovation with the Business School is attractive.