Glenn Groulx

Dear Participants,

This is a concluding post for the blogging seminar within the SCoPE forum. However, I would like to extend an open invitation for theparticipants to visit my posts and drop me a line or comment, or even send me a trackback (link to a post of mine) from your own blogs.

I want to thank everyone for your participation. I have learned a lot about facilitating an open seminar of this kind. I have also got some tentative thoughts on the process, and wish to share them here.

One thing that seemed odd was the fact that we were doing a blogging seminar from within Moodle using the forum tool. I found the forum tool a bit confining (personal bias) and moved many of the posts over to the academic blog, and then added some links here.

I could not really talk about blogging without being confined to the features of the forum tool - there are some significant issues with forums (creating only one link using the web editor, for instance, and then having to manually add links using HTML tagging within the html editor.)

Another thing that I found interesting was the mixed set of expectations.

The forum tool seemed to encourage our extroverted nature to add ideas, add comments, and I think everything went extremely well for the first week. Then the momentum fell away. The third week was pretty inactive, as I was quite busy with other things thanks to my teaching schedule. I think that running a seminar at this time is a bit challenging. Maybe it is a matter of motivation to keep producing, when all you want to do is slow down and catch your breath. Getting ready for the holiday season, wrapping up some things for the semester of teaching, and preparing for the next semester, all seem to conflict with having the extra time to produce blog posts.

On the other hand, it was definitely the consensus that blogging, particularly slow-blogging (Barbara Ganley) is more suited for our introverted nature. All of us are attracted to both forums and blogs to varying degrees. I find that using my blog as a personal archive suits my more introverted nature. I can certainly do the blogging for networking, but it is more for extroverted characters, keen to tap the energies and make synergies involving others. Micro-blogging seems to be a more appropriate fit for the more extroverted bloggers.

I think it is important we approach blogging with a view to the long-term, with the intention to embrace different type os bloggign spaces, and take on differnt roles to see how well they fit.

I realized that forums can play a lot of important roles. I spent some time participating in a number of group forums and participated at length in some discussion threads. The emotional sense is different with forums than with blogs. You open the forum hoping for a comment - you read other comments and fire off your own comments with enthusiasm and anticipation. That is the lure of the forums - they are highly social. But the draw is their immediacy, their currency.

Not so much with blogs. You don't open up your own blog eagerly anticipating that someone will have replied back to one of your posts. You don't seek out others' blogs to necessarily respond to their posts. Most of the posts are about your own personal take on things, or a response to something you have read somewhere else. That other blogger will not necessarily know you have weaved their ideas or quotes into your own post, unless you send off a trackback, or add a tag that can be traced back. In effect, most interaction is done at a distance, often anonomously, and often weeks, months, or even years after the original ideas were posted.

Over time, bloggers recognize that their ideas start to get read, their ideas get replied to, or begin to get re-tweeted on twitter, and more and more people are viewing the posts. This is what I refer to as blogging "in the open", which is sort of ironic, since you are aware of only a very small fraction of your audience, those who make the effort to contact you directly.

I especially appreciated the comments made by several participants who clearly do not want to commit to blogging in the open about their professional concerns. Jo Ann Hammond referred to blogging in the open using the metaphor as birthing, growing and nurturing and safeguarding the child before giving birth to it, and opening it up the blog to the public.

I find the twitterverse quite busy, quite overwhelming. I send out tweets to notify groups about new blog posts, but seldom dip in and visit regularly. George Siemens (I am sorry I don't recall the source) indicated at one point that he learned much more about his colleagues thanks to Twitter than through the blogs.

This revelation made me stop and think. Why do we craft our identities so much, so precisely, when crafting posts for our blogs? Whay do we reveal a tiny slice of our passions using blogs, but are willing to reveal so much more through Twitter or chat or facebook?

I have noticed experienced bloggers branch off over several different blogs, and others stick to one blog and place only specific types of posts into it. Many bloggers blogging for more than a couple of years and who have blogged about 200 posts or more seem to grapple with the question of whether to keep everyithing in one blog or branch off and build multiple blogs.

I remember a big transition for me was to move the blog posts from the safe space of the school blog to the open range. I needed to choose to migrate certain posts that matched the range of topics, and I needed to re-tag them, re-categorize them, review and revise them. The experience of reviewing previous posts with a goal to present to a public shifts one's perspective.

How we present ourselves to multiple audiences requires us to define our limits of self-presentation, our virtual personae. This requires a reflective blog, just to consider this. I think that this self-reflective blog, this meta-blog, is part of the personal blog. It the executive blog that oversees the other blogs we have been posting as owners, or as contributors.

Perhaps a topic for the Scope seminar is the use of personal blogs to organize, monitor and coordinate self-development across everal blogs.

Thank you again everyone for joining me in this seminar on blogging.

sincerely,

Glenn Groulx

There have been questions about using voice with blogging. So I have prepared a brief intro to the topic, and attached an example. I would like to invite participants to record a 2-3 minute unedited talk and attach it to your posts.

I use a small portable digital voice recorder that captures up to 35 hours of voice recording in MP3 format. I use it for voice memos, or to reflect "open mic" on related articles. I complement the voice-over with a text post, or a photo, or a slideshow, or a rich picture.

I know the quality is sometimes less than ideal - oftentimes distractions and noises intrude - and we just go with the situation, not turning off or re-winding the tape. I try to plan my voice-overs a bit and not do it entirely ad lib. However, the ad lib interviewing is interesting, as it takes on a truly spontaneous element that canned polished responses lack. I don't tend to edit out the silences, the re-phrasing, the real-time struggle for the right phrasing, the right words, the right imagery, all this sense-making activity is captured as a gestalt.

I think the value of voice blogging is that it gives the speaker a lot of immediate feedback on the way their voice is projected - tone, wording, pitch, etc. The speaker gets a raw take on their mannerisms, and the potential of voice-blogging is the self-referential feedback loop.

Sylvia and I sat down and had a chat. I had done some prep beforehand, thinking about the questions I wanted to ask in advance, and reviewing the background information about ScoPe and my impressions of it. I considered my "hook" what perspective I would take, and went with that.

One thing about live interviews is that they capture the working through of ideas - I always know I have got the right mix when I ask questions that the interviewee has not considered before. The give-and-take, the passion for ideas, is best captured in voice-blogging when you introduce your shifts of perspective, your turn of phrase, your context. Voice-blogging makes the listener aware that the interlocutors are aware of each other, themselves, and their audiences. 

For more examples of voice-blogging, please visit:

Talking About Blogging With Alan Levine

Talking About Blogging With Darcy Norman

PageFlakes:

I have aggregated the individual blogs of participants onto one pageflakes.com at http://www.pageflakes.com/edublogging/

If you have other blog URLs you want added, just let me know in this forum, and I can add them as flakes to the aggregation. I have also added bookmarks and a blog search flake.

Wire Feature Within ELGG

Within ELGG, I use the wire feature frequently to announce shifts in my blogging activty, and announce new content published with the Academic Blogging Circle, a group I maintain to focus on academic blogging issues and strategies. It is a lot like Twitter, but I need to distinguish between the two, as they serve different needs, and are intended for the most part for different audiences.

I have made this differentiation largely because of my own personal preferences of what I find useful/distracting as content within ELGG. Everyone's preferences differ, and so here are my views:

use the ELGG Wire for 'Internal Community' business

If I find a cool link related to my topic, I add it to my bookmarks; if I know it is of use to a few of my colleagues, I post it to the group as a bookmark. If it is a link of possible interest to a larger audience, I blog it, and set it to a public access setting. The Wire posts relate to shifts in direction, such as a new photo portfolio, or a new series of blog posts, or a new set of files uploaded,or a new poll, all intended to promote the academic blogging group. I sometimes use the Wire to re-promote older content, or promote a link to a research presentation of potential interest to the ELGG community.

Twitter

I don't use the Twitter in the same way as the Wire. I don't, for example, post interesting links I may find in passing to the Wire; instead, I post it to Twitter only if I do not have the time to analyze the content and I am on the go. Twitter, to me, is a mobile (micro-blogging) app, useful for capturing resources quickly (I cannot help but think of skimming) .

I also send out a general announcement to larger audiences of some of my new blog posts using Twitter, and feed-forward the link to other learning communities external to AU landing. This is done sparingly, as every single Tweet is archived, and viewable by anyone searching using your twitter name (in my case, @ggroulx).

I cannot help thinking about the use of twitter as the more advanced app that builds upon the strengths of both USENET newsgroups and IRC. For this reason, I consider it an extension of the networking capacity that spreads out my social web. On the other hand, I consider the blogs as the information hubs, the repositories, so to speak, to which other content is connected.

In effect, for me, the Wire is a tool within ELGG to announce events relating to the group, or to announce the publishing of significant new content such as my own published papers, presentations, interviews, links to my academic portfolio and the recording of the academic portfolio defence.

Twitter, for me, is intended as both an announcement tool, like the Wire, as well as a mobile blog, to drop content while on the go. I have been watching the ways in which others have been using twitter, and this, for me, seems a reasonable way to add value for those who follow the tweets you create. Like the use of the Wire, the Twitter tweets can potentially benefit others, and so the announcements need to reflect that.

Here is an interview I had with Sylvia Currie at the ETUG workshop last week. Sylvia is the SCoPE community facilitator. What are your impressions of the interview about SCoPE community? Was there anyhting that surprised you? Also: Was there something else you wanted to comment on or ask about? You can use your blog to comment on this topic, or respond in this forum thread.

Spotlight on SCoPE - A Chat with Sylvia Currie