digital lifeboat

Christopher Sessums (if you do not read his blog weekly you are missing a deep well of resources) reflects on

So what are you blogging for? Why is it your business to blog? (Pssst… pass it on.)

http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/339519.html

So I thought I would look back to my first blog post, two years ago.

I started blogging to ensure that my “notebook” was on line and accessible everywhere. It seemed to me that if I was going to study on line I should where ever possible work on line.

I then got interested in reflective writing and reflection as part of the learning cycle. A new concept to me and a missing link in my personal development particularly in my work.

The next phase was moving from a personal journal in an institutional VLE plus personal blog,  to joining an online community and the cross fertilisation of ideas from commenting and reading other blogs.

So where now for this blog at the end of the second year. Why is it my business to blog?

The learning journey is not over and the reflective process is embedded in my routines now. The resources of the past two years are readily accessible in my “digital lifeboat” and ready to be mined again in the future when needed.

It is now a significant part of my learning process. The video on Sessums post above gives lots of good reasons why blogging is a process of personal self discovery. Bloggers speak of their compulsion to read and comment on the reflections of others. One talks about self disclosure and privacy. Another of learning from their students reflections on them.

I think one of the greatest appeals is that it is a creative form of communication. This semseter I have made little effort to augment my blog with video or graphics. That is something to develop in the future

Hi this is a test for feeding eduspaces from the digital lifeboat at edublogs!!!

No sign of this working at the moment but I guess things could be amiss at eduspaces end.

Cheers Happy Christmas everyone. Hope the storm ends soon!

Dear [blogger ] blog will you ever forgive me for leaving you…hope all is forgiven I’m back.

Eduspaces is being held to ransome by the site owners who appear to be blackmailing the education community into taking action!

Weeks 1-10 from this semseter have been backed up and posted to Web ct. I can’ t see any way of re- publishing having lost all the comments and the grouping.

Later imported into this wordpress.

The sad lesson is you get what you pay for in life and there is no such thing as a free lunch. I will have to find another method of achieveing the sort of flexibility and creative working we had in eduspaces.

I certainly have to think of a rock solid solution for the third year. I guess everything will have to just be posted twice. I will use web ct for evidence and this blog for mulling and thinking, but the collaborative stuff will not happen. Why should a lecturer go to half a dozen different blog sites to keep track of their students.

Today I was following a current controversial news story and checked into the bbc news website to see the latest on the situation. I was surprised and interested to see that following an update on the facts there was a rating of the story as it appears in global blog postings. It was also reported that a protest Facebook group had been started in response to this particuar situation.

This may have been going on before but I have never noticed activity on the “blogosphere” reported on the bbc news online as part of the main news item coverage before.

“A brief survey by BBC Monitoring on 29 November 2007 indicated that the story was not yet featuring prominently in the global blogosphere.

For example, a search on the Technorati website at 0945 GMT produced fewer than 300 hits, mostly from US and UK bloggers. “

After a bit of messing about finally found the solution to the problem with my old blogger blog. I was looking at ways to bring it all under the same roof as eduspaces. I had not realised that the settings I set when I first started out last year, namely keeping the blog private, was stopping me from migrating successfully. When I started the blog I did not want it to be read by anyone unless I gave them the url. Initially I was thinking about transferring the thing wholesale and looked at a couple of solutions for doing this, neither of which I could get to work.

Finally changed the old blogger blog settings to public, and now I have the old blog as a feed, both on the profile page here in eduspaces and more usefullly in IE feeds. Simple and effective. Still learning about how these all work.

The good thing about the feed into IE is that I get a nice list of my keywords�on the right hand side,�so I can quickly search my old blog without having to go off and log into the blogger site or browse to the url while I am working in here. Only one small bug in that all the dates display wrong month but this is not a deal breaker.

This cartoon by Dave Walker

I have to say I am glad I started putting in keywords from the start. I had no idea that I would write so much over the course of this MSc!