Wow – I’ve had this blog for three years! Unbelievable!

I started the blog when I was a grad student at FSU. Originally it focused on the intersection of social media, corporate education (what I did for a job back then) and my graduate studies.

Since then, I transitioned into “doing” social media full time.  I’m in a marketing role now, but what I do is really more education. And social media. I love it. I’ve changed the focus of my blog from education to storage….because that’s my main focus.

Some stats from Feedburner (which started in May of 2008..):

• The blog has had 34,353 views
• I have posted on lots of topics – geekdom, storage industry topics, women in tech, edutech
• I’ve averaged 286 subscribers (though right now I have 507)

All of this seems unreal. The blog has enabled me to meet so many new people, to become embedded in the educational social media field (with the Beard’s crew!), to get speaking gigs at conferences, and to land the perfect job for me.

For me, blogging is the ultimate reflective tool. I’m overwhelmed that anyone else finds my musings useful….but I’m eternally grateful for the connections this blog has enabled.

I hope you stick around for my storage ramblings…I promise to continue to weave in posts related to social media and education. Here’s to another 3 years!

My new position at Dell Storage is technically a marketing position. People have asked me – you just got your master’s degree in education – how can you do marketing (this is usually after jokes about a techie crossing over to the dark side…).

I have always thought there was lots of education skill needed in marketing. And let’s be honest – right now in the storage industry things are moving so fast that the early adopters are being taught by the technical marketers.

Then I read a post by Alistair Croll that convinced me I was right about the similarities between education and marketing. His post outlines the three questions all marketers must answer:

Who’s the audience

What specific action do you want them to take?

Why will they take that action? What’s their motivation?

This makes the similarities between marketing and education pretty apparent to me. The first one (from an edu point of view) should set up what sort of knowledge a person should have coming into a course. The second question speaks to what action a learner should they be able to perform after taking the instruction – learning objectives 101. The third one is all about motivation – how do you get a learner’s attention so they will want to learn what is in the lesson.

The point is, good marketing and good education have one core tenant in common – it should be all about the end user. I’m excited to use my education training in a new discipline – even more so since I get to be technical!

@storagezombies wanted me to mention that both education and marketing have zombies. Since I am scared to death of @storagezombies, I am mentioning that here.

Today was EMC’s annual Innovation Conference, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person again.

I wanted to blog this before the conference – and I wish I would have because I was very surprised that what I wanted to blog about was discussed by several of the speakers.

Here is my opinion of the ingredients needed for innovation:

• Firm understanding of the fundamentals. This is where education comes in. You need to understand the concepts of a discipline, you need the vocabulary and current theories.
  You also need to understand the history of your discipline – because all concepts and theories are formed from political and other filters (they are never 100% scientific and neutral).
• The ability to try and fail – over and over again. Once you are armed with a firm understanding of the fundamentals of your discipline, you need to be in an environment where you can test out theories.
  You have to be in an environment where its ok to say “I wonder what would happen if I…….”. If the idea fails, you need a safe environment to learn from the failure and try something else.

Both of those points were made over and over again today at the Innovation Conference. It was great to hear!

This video is great. It talks about how putting things out on the Internet causes context collapse – we know ANYONE can see it, and we may even have to see it.

So one way we know ourselves is by our relationship to others. Now that there are new ways to connect with others, we have new ways to know others. Does this mean we are finding new ways to know ourselves?

What do you think this means for education?

I’ve been mulling this post over for a few days now. But after reading some of Harold Jarche’s posts, I have decided now is not the time to be scared to speak up.

I know everyone does not understand the big deal about blogging. I’ve even heard it said that if people have time to write a blog, they obviously have too much time on their hands. Well, since my blog is all about corporate education, I want to talk about how blogging is actually an educational tool.

Blogging can be used as reflective practice. Now what is reflective practice? This paper (Blogs, Reflective Practice, and Student-Centered Learning) defines reflective practice this way:

Reflective practice is an approach to learning that encourages thought about what has been experienced and seen, which can then drive new theories and investigations to test those theories, leading to new experiences that may, or may not, validate the original ideas. This leads to them being modified, extended, and refined, and the cycle continues.

So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).

That article outlined the benefits to blogging in two areas:

1. Activity
   You have to post regularly, you have to think about *what* to post, you have to collect information/experience things and then distill your thoughts so that you can communicate them effectively. Added to this is the experience blogs give you about internet technologies (html, linking, searching, installing and managing blog software, user design, etc). Blogging follows the reflective cycle of planning –> experiencing –> observing –> reflecting.
2. Social/Pedagogical
   Blogs help form communities. People blogging about the same subject read each other’s blogs, comment on each other’s blogs, and create new posts based on the posts on other blogs. It greases the wheels for the cycle of reflective practice. Blogging helps experts dive deeper into a subject (innovate?), while providing observational materials for novices.

We’re starting to see some reflective practice internally, but not in the form of blogs and definitely nothing that has been orchestrated. So my question is: would blogging work as a reflective practice if we tried to orchestrate it?

Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Blog wrote a post on Creating an Organizational Culture of Reflective Practice where she recommended ways to build structures to support a reflective culture. These structures included creating internal blogs, connecting employee blogs, building blogging into the close of a project, and creating project wikis. Most importantly, she suggests creating “structures and rituals that invite questions, conversation and stories”.

I’d like to see a way to tie blogging to individual learning events, just like K-12 teachers are doing. Not sure how that could happen in a busy corporate environment (esp one that does not value blogging as a way to learn).

One way she suggests doing this is to have your own “Big Question” a la ASTD’s Learning Circuit blog. Since I know alot of EMC folks follow me, I’m going to try it outside the firewall. (cue scary music here!!!) The question is for everyone, not just EMC folks.

Here are the rules:

Answer the question in a blog post of your own. Come back here, leave a comment and a link to the post. If you decide to blog on EMC ONE, don’t add the link here, just let us know to look for it internally. I’ll do a roundup of all the answers I get around December 15.

Here is the question:

Do you use blogging as a reflective practice? Do you blog about things that are directly related to your job duties? Has blogging increased your level of understanding about your role, your organization, or your field of practice?

I am working with my group on our final project. Of course I have a beta class delivery due right at the same time. I am so awesome at scheduling things like that! (oh yes, that is sarcasm).

For our final project, we must make an image map of our causal maps. I am a little annoyed at this, as no instructions were given besides “upload it”.  There was not much instruction given about “what is” an image map, just a link to a wikipedia page.

This means in my group, I’ll be creating and designing the image map. I can guarantee no one else has ever ssh’d or ftp’d files to a web server.  I’m annoyed because there are not even instructions provided to us on how to access the space we are allotted at FSU. I hunted for it, and I think I found the correct information. But I can’t log into the server. I sent an email to campus support, hopefully they will resolve it quickly.

In the meantime, does anyone know of a free, easy to use social-type software that allows you to use the map tags? Wikispaces and edublogs strip the tag. I think we may just have to post the map someplace, and create wikis for the linked content.

Again, it’s great that my professor is having us do these technical things, but I don’t think he realizes how much he needs to teach the basics of technology. It’s just like at work. No one understands the new social media tools, so I have been slowly teaching people.

Once people understand the tools, then they can use them and plan for them. But is it fair to just throw the tool out there and expect people to figure it out? In a summer class? When the class is about designing instruction, not creating webpages? And some people’s 4.0 is at risk because of this craziness (I know I am not supposed to care about the grade but I do!!)

That’s my rant for today. To see everyday rants – follow me on twitter. I’m sure the closer we get to Aug 3, the more colorful my rants shall be.