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

Hi Jo,

Thank you for your post.

I look forward to reading your blogs on movement therapies and art therapies when you are ready to open them up to the public, and I think that blogging in the open is a transition between  thinking of oneself as a practitioner to becoming more of a practitioner-mentor.

The challenge is to extend oneself as a blogger into various settings (anonymous, embedded, autonomous, private, networked) so we do evolve and become more comfortable sharing our ideas in various ways.

More and more experienced bloggers (those who experienced blogging in one setting or more, and wish to expand its routines to other types of personal blogs) are encountering the liminal state (as you know, Jo Ann, this is a recurring theme I touch on from time to time). I also see the pull towards setting up separate blogs, each with a different focus, and I also see the appeal of consolidating the streams into one mega-blog, migrating the posts from my other blogs and applying categories to them, so I can keep the posts all under one hosting space, rather than scattered across the net.

I really like the metaphor of the birthing of blog sites, and requiring gestation periods before blogging out in the open outside the safe, secure space of the private (semi-private) sphere.

Hi Paul,

Thank you very much for your post.

As part of my own narrative inquiry, I make use of the dialectic and take a stance that is only a window into one perspective, and then sit back and review what i had written after a few days and follow up with the other perspective, poking holes in the arguments. Both are authentic perspectives, and I completely agree with you about the relevance and usefulness of using blogs with learners who produce assignments for assessment.

Sharing one's awareness of a network, articulating frustrations and ambivalences about the tools, sharing and describing one's personal way-making , and reflecting on one's doubts and eureka moments while getting used to blogging in the open, are legitimate ways to engage student bloggers.

I think that students would benefit enormously from a discussion about how to assess the posts, argue and negotiate and bargain with you about what constitutes a good post, a great post, and a post that needs work. I think there is a great potential role for assessment as long as the students get involved in the process, and contribute to the discussions.

I recognize the potential for generating feedback among learners using the commenting feature, but the issue arises that some posts will be more popular than others, will generate more comments than others, and will draw on personal experiences that resonate more closely with a greater number of learners than others.

I have concerns that frequency, coherence, and mechanics as elements of evaluation are going to limit free flowing posting by some students. But would an absence of these elements lead to much better sense-making and more meaningful learning in the long-term? Or much lower caliber of posts in the short-term that negatively impacts participation? Hard to say.

I like the idea that the feedback you provide is often done at their invitation, and not imposed. I like the idea that students have some choice about what to reveal to their assessor/instructor and their peers.

I would like to participate in that type of blogging circle as well.

Glenn

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