The Landing: The Challenges of Personal Blogging

I am a personal blogger, a reflective writer interested in journaling, cultivating my personal voice, as well as developing my official academic voice.

The first challenge of personal blogging has to do with shoring up enough confidence while expressing myself-in-the-moment. Buber (2005) refers to the act of pausing long enough to document in mid-stream one's thoughts and experiences as "essential courage". I am embracing solitude and it is not to show off, but to undertake a journey of discovery, and perhaps identify some helpful tools for personal bloggin that I can share with others.

The second challenge involves the search for the answer of how do I realistically balance the academic with the personal voices, when the characteristics of one blends sometimes with the other, blurring the voices?

The third challenge of personal blogging has to do with the balancing of the tentative with the autocratic voices, the way I come across to myself and to others, and how my personal voice is shared appropriately with my audience. To what extent am I an authority for myself, for others? And to what extent do I invite personal revisions and feedback from others? I am torn, often at cross-purposes. Sometimes I am writing for myself, in which I return to earlier posts, revise and edit and re-tag them, and then based on the conclusions and lessons I have drawn from the process of re-writing, I then write more proactively for my future self. And sometimes I have a vague sense of the external audience, vaguely throwing in additional content and using a more inclusive tone.

The fourth challenge of personal blogging has to do with using narrative more effectively, exploring the experiences more fully. Recognizing that the posts are grounded in time and place, do I owe myself more time for adding contextual cues? To what extent am I writing for the purpose of providing a more concise and coherent account? To what extent am I making decisions to hide details? reveal/distort details? What influences an I under while I write content?

The fifth challenge of personal blogging is to take a fundamentally different stance of learning: the primary purpose shifts more and more towards the personal away from the academic: blogging authentically to provide oneself an outlet for becoming an expert on one's own development. Blogging, more than any other process, is more than the technology. It is the connections, the sustained narrative, and the life-stream that leaves a legacy. Blogging personally involves the whole person, in which one engages in self-assessment, re-interpretations and descriptions, justifications and open questioning, inferences and conclusions, and so the challenge for the personal blogger is how to engage self to accomplish the witnessing of one's own life-journey.

The sixth challenge of personal blogging is how to extend oneself to serve others, and participate meaningfully as an agent of change. A persoanl blogger needs to seek venues to engage other individuals in learning partnerships, in study groups, in non-formal blogging circles, as a solo personal blogger recording one's own journey, as well as engaging others in anonymous forums.

This community does nothing to provide the anonymous forum - and perhaps it is not the intent that such a forum have a place in this setting. In any case, AU Landing does not encourage students and instructors to debate from a position of anonymity the confused, chaotic feelings and experiences, the ambivalence, of engaging others and self within AU Landing.

There is no precedent for this kind of anonymous activity within formal learning spaces. The closest is the anonymous self-help forums with clearly defined codes of conduct, where there are mentors aiding novices in their explorations. Though many times the novices talk about the same things as experienced mentors, over time the mentors point to FAQs and archives for reference materials for newcomers.

Finally, there is the challenge of how to use personal blogging to tame and train what I call the inner gladiator, the combative side to our nature. To what extent can this community tolerate the virtual wars of words between participants? How can participants learn the best methods for distinguishing between excellent debate and open warfare? Bloggers face the challenge of determining what to vent - to what extent can we as personal bloggers express our unpopular, half-baked emotional opinions in this venue? So often the venting is a kind of catharsis, a momentary blow-out of emotional energy. In the light of further reflection, the poster retracts, or apologizes, or explains, or reviews, and there is a more human face added to that post.

Comments

- Jo Ann Hammond-Meiers@joha1
Jo Ann Hammond-Meiers April 15, 2010 - 9:21pm
  
Jo Ann's responses (in red) are an interplay of reflections to glenngr4 via blog: The Challenges of Personal Blogging

I am a personal blogger, a reflective writer interested in journaling, cultivating my personal voice, as well as developing my official academic voice.

I am a relatively new personal blogger and a would-be edublogger and outreach blogger who is still feeling the ropes before being confident about where I want to arrive if I take the journey rope to different destinations.

The first challenge of personal blogging has to do with shoring up enough confidence while expressing myself-in-the-moment. Buber (2005) refers to the act of pausing long enough to document in mid-stream one's thoughts and experiences as "essential courage". I am embracing solitude and it is not to show off, but to undertake a journey of discovery, and perhaps identify some helpful tools for personal bloggin that I can share with others.

I have acquired a taste for my own meditative thinking and reflection over the years through journaling and working with people, like my mentor, Aileen Crow, who has journaled for years. She blogs on an authentic movement site and is a true Elder in the field of somatic awareness.

The second challenge involves the search for the answer of how do I realistically balance the academic with the personal voices, when the characteristics of one blends sometimes with the other, blurring the voices?

Glenn’s recent blog post on Athabasca Landing talked about his refletion on the “balance of academic and personal voice” in blogs. I think it is a matter of how to better understand the intertwining and interplay with others for specific contexts – answering questions, exploring a concept, sharing e-learning and technology information, challenging with a critical mindset.

When I describe my own experiences of blogging, for example, and use transcript analysis, that seems to be fine within an academic voice, but dismissed as pedantic by some colleagues at the College who are time-strapped and interested in clear, concise recipes for applying theories to classroom practice.

I wonder about stages of inquiry – especially as I have done quite a bit of phenomenological research for many years now. My experience is that it is much easier to learn some things than others. Sometimes shortcuts are worthy and practical; sometimes they miss the mark of integration within the self. Knowing the difference is not choosing either or, but context and purpose.

But when I switch to the use of narrative, and use the personal "I", however, it is viewed by academic reviewers as immature, undeveloped, and lacking refinement.
In phenomenological studies, “I” is not the “dismissed I” but viewed as positive intrasubjective, not navel gazing at all. In some other forms of qualitative research, the “I-s” are all valued, and themes within and between “groups of I-s” exist”. When one thinks of the personal blogging, it could be possible to find personal learning themes, personal reflections on shifts of perspective, and to some extent track learning evolution. For the purpose of sharing themes, these studied-reflections could be delved into thematically. Most people would not likely do this, but it is a valid and reliable methodology if done thoroughly and with some hope to bring forth clarity about the phenomenon of personal blogging.

The third challenge of personal blogging has to do with the balancing of the tentative with the autocratic voices, the way I come across to myself and to others, and how my personal voice is shared appropriately with my audience. To what extent am I an authority for myself, for others? And to what extent do I invite personal revisions and feedback from others?

Meta commenting about and on the process is an interesting way to elucidate an emerging phenomenon.

I am torn between writing for myself, in which I return to earlier posts, revise and edit and re-tag them, and then based on the conclusions and lessons I have drawn from the process of re-writing, I then write more proactively for my future self.

In journaling, personally, I truly write for my best friend, myself. In blogging it is a shift – I write not only to myself, but to the imagined readers (quite shifting and sometimes undefined in my mind and sometimes chosen specifically), and for myself.

The fourth challenge of personal blogging has to do with using narrative more effectively, exploring the experiences more fully.

I wonder about creative responses in my writing versus more specific areas of intellectually honing in on a topic area.

Recognizing that the posts are grounded in time and place, do I owe myself more time for adding contextual cues? To what extent am I writing for the purpose of providing a more concise and coherent account? To what extent am I making decisions to hide details? reveal/distort details? What influences an I under while I write content? For example, the use of my name, Glenn Groulx, as a tag in the blog posts that were migrated from Me2U has been indirectly hinted at by some as inappropriate. I am not upset by the request to edit
these: the concern is that the name is too prominent in the community. Yet that was not even my intent: the tagging was meant for Me2U, and was not meant to vainly showcase my blog. Now I have more than a hundred posts to go through still to change/delete the Glenn Groulx tag from my posts. This is a lengthy, arduous process, and till the tag drops in prominence, decision-makers of AU Landing removed the Tag Cloud altogether from the public page.
The fifth challenge of personal blogging is to take a fundamentally different stance of learning: the primary purpose shifts more and more towards the personal away from the academic: blogging authentically to provide oneself an outlet for becoming an expert on one's own development.
Blogging, more than any other process, is more than the technology. It is the connections, the sustained narrative, and the life-stream that leaves a legacy.

Legacy? What kind of digital footprint? A blogging digital footprint or a blogging “read”, “photo show” versus connecting with lifelong learners who are bloggers too – that has been an interesting point. I remember Glenn bringing up footprints a few years ago.

Blogging personally involves the whole person, in which one engages in self-assessment, re-interpretations and descriptions, justifications and open questioning, inferences and conclusions, and so the challenge for the personal blogger is how to engage self to accomplish the witnessing of one's own life-journey.

I wonder about when I respond and when I lead the discussion with others involved at some point or not.

The sixth challenge of personal blogging is how to extend oneself to serve others, and participate meaningfully as an agent of change. A personal blogger needs to seek venues to engage other individuals in learning partnerships, in study groups, in non-formal blogging circles, as a solo personal blogger recording one's own journey, as well as engaging others in anonymous forums.

I think I am engaging in blogging in many forms – others blogs, my blogs, course blogs, professional blogs, and it is definitely expanding my world.

This community does nothing to provide the anonymous forum - it does not encourage students and instructors to debate from a position of anonymity the confused, chaotic feelings and experiences, the ambivalence, of engaging others and self within AU Landing. There is no precedent for this kind of activity within formal learning spaces. The closest is the anonymous self-help forums with clearly defined codes of conduct, where there are mentors aiding novices in their explorations. Though many times the novices talk about the same things as experienced mentors, over time the mentors point to FAQs and archives for reference materials for newcomers.

I like to just explore and not be demanding on my blogging – I have many projects on the go – blogging is for connection and stimulates my own live-world integration.

The Challenges of Personal Blogging

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