I have been using the me2u blog since late September, 2008 and posted reflections for the MDDE605 course for the first semester till early December, 2008. Over time, I developed an interest in using the blogging tool for more than completing reflective writing to complete assignments, and started to write about other topics of interest to me.I blog because of the convenience. Lilia Efimova (2009) mentioned a number of reasons she blogs, and I will draw on those reasons. She referred to the advantage of portability, where it was so convenient to post ideas from any number of locations. I use PCs at work from my office, in the labs, at home, and while travelling or attending conferences and meetings. I also liked her reason of blogging for the “…preservation of the posts and the ideas in their current state and currency of information” (Efimova, 2009, pg. 3). I would say that the act of blogging acts as a snap-shot, as capturing the thinking processes. I think it is important to document my thinking at the time, so I can review these ideas and their progressions, possibly re-visiting the ideas and themes at a later point. Another reason for blogging is that they include context and reminders of the motivation for blogging; as a pause-point, I provide a commentary and refer to connecting ideas and references. Looking back at previous posts, I recognize that there are sometimes gaps in the referring links and minimal context. I try to put the pieces back together, asking myself what I was doing, or inferring the motivations for writing what I did at that time. Thus, blogging in a manner that provides oneself a rich picture and sufficient context of one’s own practices encourages more in-depth blogging. If one blogs for an audience of one, for oneself, the act of blogging is a process of capture, of self-referential, contextual clues, so I can pick up the path of inquiry from that point without too much extra work.In effect, 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. As I blog more, the blogs have become more and more a central presence, in which so many ideas are tied to it. Links, bookmarks, embedded links to others’ blog posts and web sites, meta-data are only part of the way the blogs have become a central hub for my online presence. The meta-data is crucial, too, in that I can see how others interact with my edublog. This is one main reason I wanted to migrate the blog from me2u: I had little information about the number of visitors, and how they were entering and navigating within the blog. With edublogs.org, I receive statistical data about visitor activity.My experience is comparable to Lilia Efimova’s reflections on her use of her blog to organize the process of completing her PhD (2009). She explained that she used her blog for information management, and that she paid special attention to the act of meta-blogging, to creating and selecting appropriate tags and categories. I think that the need for the process of meta-blogging surfaces as an issue once one has several online sites, and once has blogged for six months or more, and created more than 50 entries.I started out with a web site in September 2008, to complement the blogging I was doing for MDDE605, and then cancelled the hosting in July 2009, when I decided to migrate most of the posts on the topic of edu-blogging on the me2u blog to the new professional edu-blog (netizenship.edublogs.org). My own experience has been that the decision to migrate my posts to a personal blogging space from Me2U prompted me to review my posts, and re-assign categories and tags to them, and then re-publishing them.The decision to migrate was a big step: I had about 80-90 posts within the Me2U blog-space, and they were relatively well-hidden within the walled garden from public scrutiny. Recognizing that all my posts would now be available to a public audience, other than a cohort of fellow learners, required me to re-assess the reasons for posting (or choosing not to post) certain entries. I now had moved from being an autonomous edu-blogger (one who blogged on a specific topic related to an assignment within Me2U, among a select group of peers) to a networked blogger. I realized that my audience had shifted from my peers, to an unknown number of strategies. I needed to re-orient myself, and consider again the purposes for blogging. What role would I adopt? And this is what prompted me to begin writing about student blogger roles, of idealized archetypes. By the end of July, I had culled and sorted and sifted and re-examined my posts, and published 60, or two-thirds of them, to the new professional/personal blog on edublog.org. I paid a modest hosting fee for the year, much cheaper than the hosting fee of the other service I had been using.Blogging Practices:Efimova (2009) refers to self-linking and running titles as ways to organize blog posts informally. Self-linking refers to a flurry of short posts connected to one another by links. I personally did not do this, instead attempting to chunk the ideas within a single post in content that make sense in its own right, without drawing extensively on other links. In effect, my approach was to write stand-alone posts, with sufficient context, so that it can be referred to in an email as one coherent thought, rather than requiring the reader to refer to other links of mine to make sense of the ideas presented.Running titles involves cutting and pasting others’ main ideas from others’ (or one’s own) own blogs, and then blogging ideas based on the copied ideas. I have done this on several occasions, referring to main quotes (along with a link to the whole post). I don’t often link to my own posts within the same blog, and instead use categories or tags to ties related posts together. However, I do link to content from my blog I have uploaded to my e-portfolio/blog on posterous.edublogging.com. For me, I found the use of the e-portfolio feature in me2u challenging to use, and have not used it. As well, I have stopped using the bookmarks and rss feeds features, so that I could instead develop a more public presence. I mainly use the posterous blog for MP3 podcasts and rich pictures and documents. I like to keep my content distributed, so that my online presence is not compromised by outages, maintenance, or accidental loss of data.Efimova (2009) summarized her main reasons for blogging in the following manner:“In sum, the weblog provides me with a space to create a repository of insights that otherwise would be scattered across different spaces or not documented at all” (pg. 5).I look at the blogs as a centralized platform for expressive writing, for self-talk, for connective writing, and for self-reflection. The more I blog, the more fine-tuned, the more purposeful, and the more expressive the blogging activity becomes. For me, blogging has provided me with the necessary skills and attitudes to focus on autonomous learning, and work with Terry Anderson as my mentor. I have been often surprised by how keenly attuned he has been, offering hints, comments, and resources “at just the right time”. His capacity to guide and inspire has been uncanny. The process of independent blogging has expanded my keen desire to communicate with others. I have received an incredible opportunity for independent study, and I would recommend any learners considering self-paced, independent studies to consider using the edublog as the tool to enable self-discovery and meaningful learning. Reference:Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. Forthcoming in: HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)Retrieved September 11, 2009