Comments on: Wrapup: How people use blogging to learn

By: I’m not blogging because it’s easy. « Mollybob Goes To School

I’m not blogging because it’s easy. « Mollybob Goes To School — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:55:53 +0000

[...] heaps of literature out there that tells me how beneficial to learning blogging is, and some great recounts of personal experience from students just like me, I still find it scary. Infact, I find it absolutely freakin’ [...]

By: mollybob

mollybob — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:41:27 +0000

I was one of the people that responded to your original question, and now find myself in a class where we are blogging for reflection. Your post rings more true than ever – thanks for putting it up.

By: eLearningLearning | Forum Friend

eLearningLearning | Forum Friend — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:47:19 +0000

[...] has an impressive homepage, and some gold posts linked to it – a topic I want to contribute to in the near future here – but I am sceptical about [...]

By: Researching, “Hierarchy of Change”, and Blogging | Adventures in Corporate Education

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:57:41 +0000

[...] The first chapter had an interesting diagram of hierarchy of change that made me think of my ongoing thread about using blogging for reflective [...]

By: gminks

gminks — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:31:26 +0000

Ken, wouldn’t you agree that blogging is mechanism that allows a person actually do the reflecting and therefore the learning?

It’s almost like having an assignment to reflect and write when you are serious about blogging. You want your blog to remain current, so you have to post regularly. I actually know some people who have a goal of writing a post once a week.

I know lots of people who don’t blog too, and I think they are really missing out on a great way to expand their own knowledge. Maybe they understand the effort it takes to reflect and write, and they don’t think that payoff for that effort will be worth it.

By: Ken Allan

Ken Allan — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:04:11 +0000

Tēnā koe Gina

Thank you for this post. I agree with much of what you list here. Blogging is a wondeful tool that can assist learning.

I’m interested in what you said about, “blogging makes people slow down, think about their topics, and reflect”.

I agree in part with this, for slowing down, thinking about things – which indeed is what reflecting is all about – can permit learning to happen. Blogging definitely enables all of those things you mention here, and of course, some people are more effective at getting blogging to work for them than others.

But if a person chooses to write posts on a blog and responds to those who comment on the blog, reads posts on other people’s blogs and comments on these, and truly thinks about all of what they are doing while they are doing all these things, then learning will almost certainly take place.

What I’m not so sure about is that blogging makes this happen. My strong feeling is that it is the blogger who makes this happen. That brings a different aspect to what blogging is about.

In much the same as a learner will only learn if there is a learning desire to begin with, I feel that the adage about the horse and the water has a lot of truth in it. It applies as much to blogging as it does to drinking water.

I like blogging, because it permits me to slow down and think about what I’m doing. The result is that I reflect on things in a way that makes learning effective for me. But I choose to do that.

Among my colleagues, friends and relations are many who will not blog. And that group is in the vast majority, despite the knowledge they have about blogging being in existence and that it’s free.

Best wishes in the coming New Year
from Middle-earth