I just used Tweet Cloud to generate a cloud of the most frequently used words of mine over the past year, and think this is a nifty way of offering a (quantitative) visual snapshot of what I tend to talk about.

The words are, in order of most used, are:

• blog
• post
• research
• time
• office
• class
• thank
• project
• online
• finally
• morning
• tonight
• conference
• week
• getting
• paper
• people
• learning
• night
• home
• tomorrow
• evening
• love
• outside
• comment
• rain
• hope
• lunch
• comments
• autoethnography
• meeting
• email
• wonder
• wonderful
• late
• nice
• practice
• course
• dinner
• finished
• updates
• qualitative
• music
• feedback
• coffee
• enjoy
• wish
• sounds
• wine
• busy
• blackberry
• teaching
• waiting
• little
• jeffreys
• feel
• final
• read
• business
• manhattan

One of the weekly assignments I have for the online class I am teaching, Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design (#PPOCCID), is for my students to have a weekly blog post about something to do with the content of our class. I make the assignment rather broad, as I know that learning can take place at odd times and in unlikely ways, so I want my learners to feel flexibility in what they write about and explore.

With this in mind, I wanted to follow my own assignment and discuss something I found interesting in one of the readings from this past week’s class (where I ran out of time and did not discuss), Tools for Online Engagement and Communication by Richard S. Lavin, Paul A. Beaufait, and Joseph Tomei. In this chapter, the authors do an excellent overview of a number of current web-based technologies that are useful to help people  develop their online identities, communicate their stories with peers, and begin to engage in online community.

With the focus on blogs, wikis, and technologies to assist with digital storytelling, I am reminded of how I started blogging several years ago to explore my own thinking, and still use it to help me process my work, usually with the benefit of getting additional feedback that in turns helps me move my thinking forward.

With this in mind, I like how the authors of this chapter (who do one of the better introductions to blogs and wikis) begin it:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are

few.” (Suzuki, 2006, p. 21)

In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner’s mind (shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment is asked to look at things as they are, without preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from learners’ perspectives is to see things the way new students do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks that they might face, a task that takes on added significance in light of the relative newness of online education. Online education acts as a universal solvent, dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have taken for granted.

I have thought a lot about blogging, and have engaged in it for so long that my perceptions about it may be different from how those new to the concept of blogging may perceive it. I have seen learners grow in their sophistication, professionalism, academic prowess, and even reflective practice, and am so look forward to seeing how my current learners experience this.

I think Twitter has an interesting new image for their persistent problem remaining technologically feasible!

I think I finally got my tagline right:

I facilitate the research and practice of postmodern learning.

Many thanks to all the suggestions, comments, and reflective ideas.

I wonder if my colleagues will agree with my ongoing reflective activity?

I tried it again today, and it seems co.mments is once again working (though still somewhat intermittently).

Well, perhaps it is working more intermittently than I like, but at least that means they are still in business!

This week in the Facilitating Online Communities (FOC08) course, our assignment is to consider blogging networks. What an interesting idea, blogging communities. I can’t say I ever thought about this before, though if I did it would have been about 2 years ago or so when blogs seemed to be the main social media technology.

A blogging network is a community of blogs. Nice and simple (seemingly) at first, until I start to think of some of the implications. I usually think about the blogs as extensions of the authors, though some blogs that I regularly read and find very valuable, such as Mashable and CogDogBlog, I think of in an impersonal way and without thinking about the authors. Not quite sure why; perhaps larger than life or because I do not know the authors well (only meeting F2F in passing)? With those two (as examples), I read and follow, but think it is mainly in a one way direction (I do not think they read my blog, for example).

Whatever the case, I never really considered a blogging network as the Blogosphere. I always thought of the Blogosphere as the place in the giant network in the sky where all the blogs lived. Of course, social media and Web 2.0 are so much more complicated now that it is not even completely simple to even define a blog any longer, much less to speak about the Blogosphere as if such as a (stable) community could exist any longer.

Regardless, many of those in our online course (FOC08) do follow and comment on one another’s blogs. However, I am not sure if this happens enough to consider their blogs a community. While my first thought is that something such as this could never have a facilitator, I am beginning to think that the vastness of the Internet makes it easy to get distracted and lost and overwhelmed and thus behind or distanced from one another (ironically, as the Internet is nothing if it is not distance!). Perhaps blog community facilitation is a new area of inquiry and practice?

What to do about this? Dedicated RSS feeds or field trips or commitments to comment or even set due and comment deadlines? I am now wondering if there is any research out there about this . . .

Let’s see how well this works; I wonder what my colleagues think?

I was asked to consider this question:

Describe one of your own creative works and what you accomplished with it – then become your own critic and find out what you could have done better.

I looked at this question for some time, as I do not normally consider myself the most creative person. Knowing this is probably not the case, I am thinking about how I am often creative in my academic research, my professional work in instructional design and organizational consulting, my teaching, and here on my blog, the one public outlet for my creativity. 

I suppose one creative work is this very blog, as it has been ongoing since my first post on December 7, 2006. Hundreds of posts later, with my daily Tweets captured here as well, I can say that I am still capturing my daily thoughts and feelings and interests and sharing them with anybody and everybody online, whether they are interested in them or not. This blog becomes fertile ground for my experiment in reflective practice.

What can (could) I (have) do (done) better? I can censor myself less by writing in a manner that more closely resembles my spoken voice. There is little that is not public, and maintaining a personal blog is one way to own my (virtual) identity. I should probably write in my own voice more, as others who do so are quite refreshing. I think Twitter is helping with this. Restated a positive way, I can be more authentic and self-identified. Perhaps that is exactly what I am attempting with all the writing about liveblogging I have been doing? Perhaps that is why liveblogging is my next area of formal research? Perhaps autoethnographically studying my liveblogging I will learn something about media-supported live expression and self-narrative?

And I thought this question would be difficult to answer!

So, Northern Voice is finished. What to do with it now?

I think I will let my blogging tagline guide me for my next step as I begin my debrief:

Reflective practice in organizational learning, educational technology, and postmodern society.

Reflective Practice

I want, or rather need, to continue to reflect on my experiences. This reflection is critical to my learning. Writing new blog posts after having liveblogged every session I attended at nv08, Tweeting, and reviewing my Flickr photos to help me recall forgotten moments are all conscious choices I am making to foster my own grounding and creative development. So much content and experiences and learning so quickly was overwhelming. Strange how writing, even here, helps me to process it all.

Organizational Learning

I did not attend nv08 alone. I started to read more blogs and Tweets of people who I knew before the conference, as well as people I met while there. My FeedDemon feeds (kept current on my blog) have been working overtime, and I think that I will be adding to these in the coming week or so as I recall people who I wanted to follow but did not add them at the time.

Educational Technology

I learned edubloggers are more varied than I initially thought. For many years when I thought about edubloggers, K-12 jumped to my mind. Having met so many who teach adults, I felt more at home than I thought I would. I am actively demonstrating what I am learning via technology by committing to more actively comment than I have done in the past. I want to read and join in a community with others who have similar interests and skills and experiences and challenges. As writing helps me to learn, perhaps sharing this with others on their own social media outlets may engage others in conversation and continue the learning in new and exciting directions.

Postmodern Society

Is there a common Northern Voice attendee? Is there a common worldview there? Platform? Favorite technology? Coolest accessible app? Best approach to social media? What does it mean to have a “personal blogging and social media” conference in person at all, given the topic? Should there be a virtual conference mid-year to debrief, check-in, and prepare for the February event?

It feels liberating to consider NV within the context of my blog’s tagline. Hey, if it does not fit there, then the tagline needs to evolve. Glad to see the revised (current) one I developed a few weeks ago, after working on it for weeks, seems to be just right. For now, at least.

Technorati Tags: nv08,northernvoice,reflective practice

I was looking for Flickr pictures of Northern Voice 2008 using the nv08 tag, and was pleasantly surprised to see both nv08  as well as moosecamp listed as Hot tags over the last week. Great to have been part of something that shows up on Flickr with this much influence!

My full-size screenshot of this is now on Flickr adding to the nv08 tags, too!