Back Again

It was inevitable.  My return to blogging....the start of semester 5 in ITS and now a class required posting for EDIT 413.  The students in EDIT 413 are reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind as part of their study of Technology and the Culture of Learning.  I wondered what insights the 5th semester ITSers might have to offer if I used that as a topic for this posting?  Good time to practice remembering the concepts of that book for your professional portfolio and Exit Experience! But I'm also a week behind the blog topic for EDIT 719-- Blogs in education.
Always the believer in making something count twice.... I think the use of blogs in education directly supports the metaphor of a whole new mind.

Design: Pink quotes John Heskett, "Design...can be defined as the human nature to shape and make our environment...to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives (p. 69)."  Using blogs at the highest level of connective writing (as described by Will Richardson) certainly has the power to shape the thinking space of our environment as a blog can be far reaching and foster social negotiation of meaning.

Symphony: Complex blogging (extended analysis and synthesis over a long period of time) (Richardson, 2010, p. 31) offers the opportunity for a writer to bring together comments, links, analysis, previous posts to see a bigger picture.

Empathy: To blog at Richardson's highest level of blogging, requires the use of higher order thinking skills such as analysis and synthesis of thinking beyond the author's own perspectives. This requires the author to seek out multiple perspectives but also to write in such a way that others want to connect with you. Can you do this with imparting information only?  It takes more than that. As Maya Angelou shared, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." How you make others feel through blog writing is what keeps them coming back. Blogging requires the author to understand the audience. Rather than walking in their shoes, Thinking in their minds.

Play: Blogs provide the author a chance to experiment and test out thinking, to test out material.  There is value in self-reflection and private journaling.  But to really play with an idea and move that idea beyond the idea stage, it just might take playing around with it in a wider audience.  Research and publishing used to scare, intimidate me.  But then I thought of it as an adventure, a chance to 'play' with ideas in the field of educational technology and receive feedback and sometimes, validation for my ideas. Really embracing the Vygotskian notion that play is learning/ work is the application of learning,  gives me permission to do so, to justify that all of this play is for the sake of learning. Great ideas just don't happen or appear.  Artist Chuck Close reminisced, "Inspiration is for amateurs. the rest of us just show up and get to work.  Every great idea I've ever had grew out of work itself."  Work=Learning, Learning=Play.  We need play to learn.  We need to learn to work.  We need to work to spark ideas.

Story: As we face an age where we must put ourselves on an Information Diet we must do more than be good at developing an argument. The age of Abundance requires us to differentiate our arguments, to become more compelling in our presentation.  With students we can spend all of our teaching time scrolling through powerpoint slides loaded with text and information.  Is this an effective way to teach?  What would happen if content was delivered as a story, a narrative, through lessons in life, through relevant examples, through image? Blogging to share that story, those lessons is invaluable. After all, a number of published books began as blogs and you too can turn your blog into a book for a fee, of course :)

Meaning: E.M. Forster said, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"  Writing has always been an author's companion.  But Blogging takes it to a whole new level with the ability to publish thoughts and negotiate meaning with a wider audience. Blogging gives purpose to our thoughts.

So if you are looking for justification as to why blogs are important in educational practice, here are six to start you off. And if you need a reminder of the metaphor describing a whole new mind as a means to survive a world impacted by the 3 A's....here are the six dimensions.