I began this blog when I began a course that was part of the BSF project, called the Transformation Teachers’ Programme. The course taught us how to use a variety of hardware and software in the classroom, and also introduced us to the concept of Web 2.0. It has been the best course I have ever attended, particularly since it opened up many different avenues such as edublogging, twittering, wikis etc. One of the tasks we were set was to keep a blog to reflect on our experiences on the course. I think it would be fair to say that many teachers gave up on the blogging fairly quickly – they know who they are! – whereas I loved it and probably blogged the most. (I was in a bit of a competition at one point with one of my colleagues, but I’ve just checked and the last time he blogged was in November, so I think I won!)

I think one of the reasons I fell in love with blogging was that I love sharing things – ideas, thoughts, suggestions, lesson plans and resources, stories about my life, whatever – with others. I have also loved writing (and reading) since I was able to pick up a pen.

One of my earlier memories is about learning to write (I must have been about five) and being told to leave a space the width of a finger between words. I wrote a short paragraph about a witch, then realised that I hadn’t left the spaces. There were spaces, but they were not the width of a finger. I therefore went back and put in little dots between the words to point out to the teacher that there were spaces, but then thought that the dots were so small, she might not see them, so I made them bigger – and got into trouble for having big black circles between my words!

I also wrote poems a lot when I was younger, and once must have really annoyed my English teacher when I insisted on rewriting a story about a house that was already about ten sides long, which became a short story about 24 pages long. When I spent a year in Malawi, I wrote long emails to anyone who would listen, and wrote even longer entries in my diary. I kept diaries on and off since primary school, but had grown out of the habit since beginning teaching. All of which means I probably had a pent up swell of words waiting for the dam to burst, so when told to blog, blog I did – and I kept on going!

Which brings me back to the point of this comment. I think the purpose (and audience) of this blog may have changed a little over the past year. To begin with, I was sharing the things I had tried out in class, and was asking questions about how to do things, which the course organiser and sometimes other participants answered and commented on. Then there was a phase when I realised that probably very few of the others on the course were that interested in blogging, so therefore were probably not reading my blog much! But I decided to carry on, for me, if no one else. So when I found interesting articles online or resources that I thought might be useful to me or anyone else that I might want to share them with in the future, I blogged them. Then gradually I began to make links with other edubloggers, and I could see by using analytical software that people were visiting my blog, even if I had no idea who those people might be! So I began to write trying to imagine that someone might be reading, and might be a bit interested in what I had to say. But I still am not normally particularly reflective, I still really use my blog as a way of sharing interesting titbits – those digital breadcrumbs that I like and come across occasionally – as well as charting my own forays into the digital world at school. And I hope that my parents might read it occasionally and know what I’ve been up to!

So … I’m sure I was going somewhere with all that … but anyway … it’s nice to have a conversation rather than a monologue – even if I have gone on a bit just now! – and I agree, I loved doing my Masters, and graduated a couple of weeks ago! I now need to decide what my next challenge will be! (Although I think Acting HoD will just about take care of that!)

Do any other readers want to chip in now?

Well I agree with everything you said, and I’m the same to some extent in terms of having more rigour over articles to be published formally.

However, because my website is also a showcase of the services I offer — inevitably rather than intentionally — I think I do have to be more rigorous than I might wish.

For example, would you consider hiring me to write a bid for government money if it looked from my blog as if I couldn’t string a grammatically-correct sentence together?

Maybe this consideration applies to people who don’t work for themselves too. I know that if I were a teacher again I would be very mindful of what a prospective employer might make of my communication skills when looking at my website.

However, an unfortunate side effect of being so rigorous is that it makes reporting on newsworthy events very difficult. By the time I have cross-referenced everything to make sure of my facts, made sure it’s interesting to read (many of the bogs I read are the intellectual equivalent of eating cardboard IMHO — not that I make a habit of eating cardboard) and spell-checked it, the rest of the world has moved on!

Interestingly, although we may get the impression that people are cavalier about this sort of thing, I have occasionally been picked up on grammatical errors — usually by Americans, who have different rules of grammar to us! — but I think it’s interesting to note how het up they get!

I have mentioned your blog in one of the comments to my blog post about the survey:

http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/article_1349.php

Good luck with your MA. I did mine yonks ago and it was a brilliant experience.

I do agree about mistakes – I try to make as few as possible, and if I notice any glaring errors later will normally go back and check them, but I don’t use a spell checker, for example, and I don’t think so carefully about my choice of vocab (when I’m blogging). Saying that, I can’t remember if I used a spell checker before handing in my dissertation either, but I certainly proof read it a couple of times and took more care over each section than I do when I post anything here.

Also, when writing a report of any description, I try to make sure that it is all properly referenced and that I have thought about my proposition, whereas here I tend to be more off the cuff, and although I try to add links to guide people to those that I have found helpful, I do not have the same rigour as I would in an essay.

I am one of those people who notices mistakes in published books and magazines and wonders why the editor overlooked that particular example, even though having been an editorial assistant I can imagine how many mistakes they have already corrected, and know how frustrating it is when you open up a just-published book and see a mistake you must have looked at a million times!

Perhaps there is also a difference in your perception of the reader. I think if I were writing something to be publicised, I would probably feel that I wanted to impress the reader more in some way, to show off my knowledge and understanding, worrying that I’d slip up in some way with the readers waiting to pounce, whereas on a blog I would expect the readers to be more understanding (naive perhaps?!), and I would write in more of a “take me as you find me” kind of way. I wouldn’t feel the need to impress as much – even though I might have more readers, or readers who have a greater understanding and are more up to date with innovations than I am!

I am sure this conversation can be continued! Perhaps in the morning … I’m off to get some sleep now … and that’s a phrase I wouldn’t really expect to read in a magazine article, unless it was a social column in the Guardian Weekend magazine or something! So that’s another difference … blogging is, at least for me, more personal than my more formal writing. And that’s it – for now!

I love: “If my blog were more literary, would I be a writer who blogs, or still a blogger who writes?”

For me, one of the distinctions is that I think it is less unacceptable for there to be typos etc in blogs than in an article intended for publication by a magazine or 3rd party website. Although having said that, I don’t much like ANY mistakes and avoid them as far as possible.