I’m generally about as unsystematic a guy as you’re ever going to find. Abstract-random and proud of it. Any sequential organization skills I bring to the table are the direct result of hard, intentional behavior-modifying labor rather than innate ability, or god forbid, preference. So I realize this question is out of character, but I really am wondering:
Does anybody use blogging for focused inquiry? Blogging as a way to systematically pursue a thesis from tentative beginning to supported conclusion? As a way to doggedly follow an open question from Point A to Point Wherever-It-Takes-You, accumulating and documenting evidence along the way, inviting dissent and questioning, modeling curiosity, uncertainty, and transparency? Where the blog is designed from the get-go to be the product rather than just the process, an artifact explicitly demonstrating what has been and is being learned?
We can all attest, most of us with passionate conviction, to the powerful, transformative learning that goes hand in hand with blogging. (And by "blogging" I mean, of course, a definition that includes all the collaborative, dialogic, networked aspects that go with it.) Most of us use our blogs as a sort of sounding board, a space for reflection, for conversation, for posing questions both rhetorical and immediately practical. We write opportunistically and improvisationally, pursuing, multiple thought-threads as we have time, and as new ideas bob into view to bump against the old. It’s not coincidence that "On My Mind" is the category on Will’s blog that dwarfs all others. Given the right prompt, we could all spin a compelling narrative about what we’ve learned through blogging and how it has toppled and reconstructed our ideas about learning. Or show it as an annual learning report per Dan Meyer‘s challenge. Or come up with another creation, another product to demonstrate learning.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what I’m really asking here, but intention and focus are at the heart of it. Blogging as a mode is fluid, organic, responsive, accidental, provisional, mysterious, wide-ranging; so is learning. A million other adjectives could apply just as well. A devil’s advocate would argue that the learning that occurs through blogging is lucky chance, or coincidence, or circumstance—because the process is anything but systematic. I’m struggling to put my finger on the common thread of learning-by-blogging, the system beneath the unsystematic surface. Evidence beyond the anecdotal for the difference blogging makes.
Higher Edison 
January 13, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I don’t think the learning is random.
The early stages of building a PLN and starting a blog may appear haphazard, but the connected learner soon begins to tailor his posts and contacts to meet a certain need. I can see the evolution of my own blog from its beginnings in June to the present: it’s less derivative now, has more personal reflection.
That’s not necessarily a good thing for the rest of the world, but I primarily write for myself. My blog serves as a mode of creative expression, not just a PD tool.
January 13, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I agree that the learning isn’t random. Just mysterious and tough to track. You make a good point about how a blog’s purpose may evolve, with clear implications for the kind of learning it fosters. Not really looking for a simple answer, I guess, because I know there isn’t one. More a matter of looking for commonalities that offer a glimpse into the operations beneath. And wondering if the commonalities point to a recipe for blogging-to-learn. If even a sketchy version of such a recipe exists, that goes a long way toward making a PD case. In other words, if we agree the learning isn’t random, how powerful to be able to show the pattern?
January 13, 2008 at 3:11 pm
This is a great question, and the answer to it, I believe, is unique to the individual. For example, when I began to write, the steps that have preceded it often resemble traditional learning: I gather resources, place them in an accessible place (my desktop or RSS starred folder) and begin to tie them together in a coherent manner. That end product, like Diane describes above, often tends to have nothing to do with my original purpose.
So in asking “where’s the learning?” or what does it look like, I certainly think it is more than by random or by lucky chance, because I set out with that in mind to begin with. The end result is where the mystery lies. That is what I cannot predict when I begin.
As far as setting out with the end in mind, I think it’s a must when you are writing, but the collaborative nature of the blog/comment process never really lets us chart that course from the outset. It’s more a wait and see, then evaluate situation.
February 2, 2008 at 4:24 am
“End”? What end?
For me, it’s sort of project-based (at least the blogging).
But the project normally begins with ideas that only form in the strange alchemical process of reading other blogs, tweets, hyperlinks, and playing with learning and creative tools, and discovering project ideas for the classroom (which is more and more, like Students 2.0, far larger than Mr. Burell’s room in H-407).
In a sense, my mind is the net. I cast it wide, draw in others’ ideas, then prepare, cook, eat, and digest them. And then, alchemically, give birth to something instead of excreting it all.
What a weird experience you just caused.
(And thanks for dropping in yesterday to Korea.)
July 18, 2017 at 9:31 pm
i like this for multiple reasons