Michele Martin has a set of very useful points about using blogging for learning .
As she points out, most of the sites that offer to help you improve your blog, assume that you want to reach a wide audience, sell something or whatever.
In fact, many of the principles of blogging that apply to selling yourself may, in fact, impede your progress if your primary goal is to blog for learning.
It’s *my* learning blog. Not yours. That said, her blog does offer some useful points from which I can learn.
To me, the most useful point she makes is:
Think about process, not product. …. Don’t be afraid to write about questions and half-formed thoughts and ideas. .
That’s also something that can be difficult to get across to students – that it’s OK to have half formed ideas; that seeing how an idea develops is much more valuable to a lecturer than seeing the end result.
Hi Emma–sometimes I think that one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to be OK with blogging about half-formed ideas and questions is because we don’t always live in a culture that supports making mistakes or being unsure of yourself. One of the reasons I think that educators should be blogging is so that they can model for students that it’s OK–in fact a good thing–for them to be asking questions and putting out half-baked ideas. Students won’t be able to really see how this works and what it can do for them until it becomes more of a part of their learning culture, which I think really has to start with the teacher in setting up that environment. I certainly know how hard it is to do that, though–I struggle all the time with feeling “stupid” if I blog about some ill-formed idea I have. In the end it’s always worth it though because I either write myself to some conclusions or people in the community help me refine my thinking, often in ways I didn’t expect.
Yes, I think that’s very true – needing to be a model for students – and as you say, it’s not always that easy! And then to get them to read something that they might not actually have to…