Personal Blogs

I decided to title this blog Sporadic Blogging as this has been my experience thus far. I decided that I was going to use my Tumblr account to blog through the course of my MAODE firstly to fulfil activity obligations, but also as a bit of a journal and to organise my thoughts, to see where I was at within my thought processes at various times chronologically. 

I must say number one, big tick, I have used it to fulfil obligations, but with regards to the rest, not really. Now I did post a couple of times to try to promote (unsuccessfully) my conference presentation for H818, but apart from that it was all activity based. By the way it should be noted I am fully aware that in order for a blog to be successful and therefore a good promotion tool then a following needs to be cultivated, and for a following to be cultivated then time needs to be spent and consistent postings need to be made. The unsuccessful nature of my promotion did not come as a shock, but it was more an ‘excuse’ to post. I use the word ‘excuse’ as this is how it feels to me when posting a blog, I mostly feel I need to be using my time wisely as it is something I don’t have much of at the moment. On reflection this is completely inaccurate as if I think about it there are many activities that I partake in that if I was prioritising differently I would rearrange. This is not to say they are more or less important, but just a reminder that not having time for something should be very rare as most of us can find the time to do things we would like to do if we are prepared to adjust our priorities.

This blog definitely falls into the category of fulfilling activity obligation, but it also has helped organise my thoughts as well. With regards to the activity itself I did not find any of the findings particularly surprising, however, personally the students who could see no value in studying in this way were, in my view, missing out on some important experiences. I think that the more interactions you have and the wider audience you reach, the more opportunity there is to see a point of view, or achieve some outcome or interact in a way that will help you see a particular point in a way that otherwise you would not. I have thought a lot about how I can use blogging in the future, one way that will be helpful to me, and it will mean moving my Blog at some point in the future, is for teaching purposes. I am retraining to be a secondary school teacher starting in September and I hope to incorporate blogging into my regular practice. I’m not 100% sure how this will manifest itself yet, but I’m sure the reading of my blog will be a weekly requirement, and will be a way to communicate information and start conversations to aid upcoming lessons etc. I’m aware this will be time consuming but I will be prioritising this because as Stephen Downes asserts, you must lead by example and write a blog first if you are going to require your students to do so at some point (paraphrase), and I will. You can find this paper by Stephen Downes at https://www.academia.edu/2869149/Blogs_in_Learning and for anybody that happens to be reading this, not connected to H800 the paper in this activity is Characterising the different blogging behaviours of students on  online distance learning course by Kerawalla et al.

On reflection maybe I should have called this blog priorities or the illusion of time or something like that, but it wasn’t planned in any way and I just started writing and so I’m not prepared to contrive it in this way, so Sporadic Blogging is the name by which it is known.