I'm the guy who shows up at a party and tells everyone news they've heard before. Tony Karrer and David Lee have begun what promises to be a valuable discussion each month - the Learning Circuits blog "Big Question". This months question seemed a bit basic, but as discussion started, it presented numerous angles I hadn't considered. The most valuable aspect of their approach is allowing LC Blog members to post on their own blog. Distributed conversations - not centralized - are important. As I've stated before, I want my comments in my space, even though I don't mind them being reflected in our forums. It's a simple shift, but one that I think will be duplicated in other spaces in the future. The mailing lists we've used in the past may be replaced by open conversations around a defined theme (perhaps LC Blog should be about aggregation of various bloggers thoughts on a focused subject (as compared to a simple aggregation of feeds without a particular theme).
The question was: should all learning professionals be blogging? I'm not exactly sure how a learning professional is defined. Is it a consultant? Or the equivalent of the generic "knowledge worker"? Is it a learner in a course or program? I'll answer the question as "should everyone be blogging". Short answer: not everyone should blog...but everyone should engage in the activity that blogging enables or affords - critical thinking, reflection, meaning making, pattern recognition, etc. If I find blogs do this for me - great. Others might find it through a pen/paper reflective journal. Or weekly meetings with colleagues. The value of blogging is not that we are writing - it's that we are thinking (with the added benefit of enabling others to interact with our ideas in their own spaces).
Posted by gsiemens at October 11, 2006 5:08 AM | TrackBack