An Open Letter of Encouragement to Adult LearnersYou have been told by your instructor to post ideas to a blog as part of the course(s) you are now taking. Why? You ask. Why now? How will this benefit me? What skills will it help me develop? How will it help me get gainful employment? How will it help me tackle my studies better? As a young adult, you may have been already keeping a private journal, or jotting down ideas for projects, or coming up with new ideas, and jotting them down. Some of you have been actively involved in high school debating clubs, or drama clubs, and now look forward to participating in a new venue. Perhaps some of you love reading, and would enjoy sharing opinions with others on different articles or books. Perhaps some of you want to explore sensitive issues, and want to tackle ideas with others in a supportive space, without worrying your personal privacy is invaded.Youcan carry on these activities using the blogging tool at Athabasca University.EduBlogging can be used as a sandbox for drafting ideas, or as a sanctuary, offering privacy and solitude for deep reflection, depending on your reasons for wanting to write.As adult learners, you might want to re-examine personal experience, cultivate your inner voice in written form so that it matches your strong spoken voice, or you might want to gain confidence complementing your verbal storytelling skills with matched written skills. Some of you might need private space to get your ideas down, or draft ideas, whether it be letters to your friends, family, or your community. Stephen Downes comments on the benefits of personal blogging in his post at http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-appeal.htmlIn general, blogging is appealing as it provides a digital legacy. It offers a public side to one’s self for others to witness. It acts as an online backup of crucial content in case one’s PC dies unexpectedly. Blogging is good for the writer and others to reflect back on and revisit. Blogging is great writing practice, a great way to present oneself to potential employers. His comments were prompted by Chris Garret’s article, “Before I Forget” in the Blog Herald at http://www.blogherald.com/2009/07/10/before-i-forget/ who contrasts the personal blog with the public blog, and contrasts the motivations for maintaining both. He explains that the emphasis changes for those writing personal blogs. The audience is reduced to oneself, and to one’s invited guests. He also explains the importance of blogging, more than any other tool, as a systematic method of contributing to one’s digital record, and uses a lifestream to describe the flow of seemingly disconnected, unrelated ideas. “The stream is made up of many random bits and pieces but when you look back your memories jog and the fragments coalesce into an ordered history” (Garret, 2009, blog post).The main reasons for starting your own edublog vary, depending on your own unique circumstances. Edublogging offers you an invitation to begin a personal, lifelong journey, in which you enter into dialogue with yourself and others. Instructors provide you with the tools for engaging self and others in your/their life-streams and become apprentices in lifelong learning. Formal education provides you with the supports for you to gradually grow and master your blogging skills, so that you can make your own informed decisions on how to communicate with others. Formal edublogging offers you a range of blogging encounters, And I can speak from my own experience that the safest route to take to learn how to blog and hold conversations within many differing blogging spaces, is to work with a learning mentor/companion within a formal schooling context. With the help of a mentor, a seemingly casual remark can spark your inspiration, a well-placed comment will spur you on to share more ideas, and re-think them in different ways. When encouraged by kind words, you will be prompted to try new things, move out of your comfort zones, and explore, and create, and blog to learn. A mentor can suggest resources, nudging you in different directions, and offer suggestions and advice on strategies for improvement. Formal education provides a lasting, sustained link to a support network so your development as a communicator is extended and extended and extended further into different contexts: from the private blogger seeking solace and solitude, to the social blogger seeking interaction and participation, to the autonomous blogger seeking to present oneself to potential employers, funders, or educational providers, to the anonymous blogger seeking to discuss private ideas is safety, or publicly perform creative works, or publish satire and critique – all these cab be served through edublogging, which makes possible the mixture of the informal learning with formal learning. I welcome you to the world of edublogging, a world of possibilities for self-making and transformational learning.