Blogging within My Personal Blog (Semester One)

My first post was made to my personal blog on September 6, 2008, in which I explored issues about the learning context based on a cluster of five main ideas. I received a comment from a fellow student, and she also used this schema of five main ideas to structure her post. Her correspondence with me throughout the MDDE605 required course and afterwards provided an excellent model for ongoing interaction within the blogging environment. In my follow-up response, I shared a resource using an embedded web link.

On September 23, I published two important blog posts: one was a reflective post on the blogging process, and the other was a collaborative meme, a set of five questions intended for sharing with others as a means for discussion. In the reflections post, I clearly demonstrated evidence of weaving others’ ideas into my own post, embedding others’ links within my own posts.

Blogging within the MDDE605 Group Blog: (Semester One)

I posted my first reply as a comment to the instructor’s post in the MDDE605 group blog, and commented on the instructor’s post in the first blog conference on unit 1 questions on September 8, 2008. I then followed up with a more detailed critique of an article a few days later, using inline citations and quotes as a blog comment. This critique was my first weaving of academic material with my own professional experience.  On September 11, the instructor replied back, weaving my words into his own response, and introduced the use of external web links for the first time.

A month later, I posted my first blog post in the class blog in which I reflected on specific unit 3 questions. This post generated a thread of sixteen comments in which I engaged in a dialogue with four other learners, with no direct instructor involvement. As it continued, the discussion became deeper, and more details were added with each comment.

Blogging as a Participant in an Independent Seminar (Semester Two)

Between January 2009 and May 2009, I enrolled in an elective course, MDDE663, and worked independently on my assignments in a cooperative learning environment with the instructor and peers. I chose to focus primarily on the development of my own blog within Me2U.

I compiled seventeen (17) annotated bookmarks within Me2U during the MDDE663 course, and posted eleven (11) posts under the MDDE663 tag between February 17 and April 6. 2009. Over time, I engaged in more sophisticated weaving activity by adding relevant quotes from my instructor’s blog posts, in-line citations, and references with links to online academic articles. I also engaged in more extensive, in-depth sense-making, in which I drew conclusions using multiple sources from a number of sources. For the next posts, I engaged in both path-making and weaving as knowledge construction activities, and explored sites and wove them together through a narrative of commentary. I engaged in both articulation and aggregation as network construction activities, in which I scanned, read, and reviewed a number of online resources outside of the Me2U network, and brought together a number of links and resources into one post. These served as a series of pause-points, a means to capture content and context for an undefined future period of sense-making.

With subsequent posts, I engaged primarily in knowledge construction in which I participated in sense-making, which involved analyzing ideas and concepts; however, the post demonstrated network construction as well, in that I engaged in piling (re-use of Tags), and weaving of content. I summarized content, embedded external hyperlinks into the blog posts, and added inline quotations. These posts were significant as a turning point because the first one received five comments from peers, and led to a follow-up session of sense-giving, in which learners engaged in a discussion that involved passing along experiences, reporting, exchanging ideas, and acting as both witness and observer. Because the comment thread was limited, the discussion split off and continued within several individual students’ blogs.

Blogging as an Independent Learner (Semester Three)

During May to September, 2009, I was enrolled in an independent study course, I was also working outside of any formal cohort, and had a more limited peer network based on a few connections developed and maintained from previous semesters within the Me2U community.

I composed a series of posts to aid me in tracking my ideas development process and document progress towards completion of the assignments, which involved developing the use of metaphors for blogging. I explored a number of blogging settings, recorded sources, commented on and recorded reflections to ideas. I posted article critiques and charts, and developed an assessment tool for evaluating student bloggers. On May 25, I posted five contributions all at once, to place them in virtual storage.

In September, as part of the final assignment for the independent study course, I engaged in the act of sense-giving, presenting my ideas to a wider audience, and I presented my ideas to a group of educators through Elluminate for CIDER on the topic of EduBlogs as Metaphor. In addition, I also began the use of podcasting to record my ideas. At this time, I recognized the serious limitations of using Me2U as an e-portfolio, and turned to posterous.com to store the podcasts.

In my final reflective post for the MDDE690 course, posted September 12, 2009, there is a significant shift in my perspective as a blogger, enabling me to participate differently in the coming semester than during the previous three semesters. I reflect on the changes in how I perceived my intentions for blogging:

‘… at a certain point, there is a shift in the intent. Once learners recognize the intrinsic value of their posts, and re-visit previous posts to glean contextual clues, and fail to find what they require, their posts change, becoming much richer, more detailed, and more purposeful, addressing the needs of the individual blogger, from the standpoint of the potential. In effect, we draw lessons from the past posts in the present, and post in the present more proactively and engage in self-talk. This act of proactive self-talk is the single-most crucial step for learners as bloggers to cross in order to change from extrinsically motivated bloggers to intrinsically motivated ones’ (Groulx, 2009, Me2U blog post).

Blogging as an Independent Learner and Observer (Semester Four)

During October and December 2009, I participated in the Me2U community as an independent learner, posting my own work in my personal blog, and reading and replying to posts within the MDDE605 course blog in the role of an observer, a former student and as an informal resource person. I also participated in the MDDE605 group blog, and wrote three posts and 13 comments. I wrote a post in which I engaged in resource-sharing, and I cross-posted it to my own blog. I received two comments from students who also shared resources. I also replied to a student asking for advice on where to find resources. I published three related posts to the group blog on tips for accessing archived blog posts from the previous MDDE605 course, how to use the Tag Cloud to find others’ blogs, and how to post to posterous.com, an e-portfolio blog site. I offered suggestions, and offered an alternate perspective to allay students’ privacy concerns, referring to the concept of personal branding. This discussion went into some detail about the Me2U learning environment.

Overall, I posted ten comments to posts published in other learners’ blogs, and shared insights, experiences, resources, and personal reflections, in which I offered feedback, and contributed to discussions about learners’ challenges and optimal blogging group sizes.