Happy 100th Blog Post! What Blogging Has Brought to Us
Today we are celebrating - in the last 7 months we have written 100 blog posts! What is this practice contributing to our work? Here are some of the things that we have identified...
Making Space for Reflective Practice – Many people say they are too busy to think or be creative. For us blogging has created a space for reflection, and reflection is an essential part of our learning process (see Kolb’s Learning Model). In writing our blog posts, we are not skipping that essential step: taking an experience, reflecting on it, then applying our learning to new experiences. Our blog helps us map our learning on a daily basis, which encourages us and focuses us on constant improvement. No learning gets lost or goes unnoticed!
Capturing our Knowledge as it Develops – Our blog is a way to synthesize and record our knowledge and ideas as they develop. It is a way to capture and create new knowledge and meaning for ourselves. It is a means of analysis (in a most non-scientific way.) And it organizes these ideas for us so that we can track them and refer back to them later.
Fostering Creative Thinking and Writing – Our blog helps prepare us for conversations where we need to articulate new ideas. It helps commit our learning to memory, helps us develop our story, and practice telling it (albeit in writing) as the message is already "chewed over" in our heads.
Developing our Personal Knowledge Management Systems – Through exploring blogging and the theories behind it, it has introduced us to new thinking about personal knowledge management while at the same time providing a new tool in our personal knowledge management tool box. It also helps us practice what we preach in terms of experimentation and creativity.
Connecting Us for Quality Inputs – Our blog has enabled valuable comment from others in the blogosphere through a self-selecting mechanism (comments are opt-in) which in our experience been about quality versus quantity.
Even now, writing this 100th blog post has given us an opportunity to reflect again on what we are learning to help us consider what we can change, do more of, or explore further to improve our learning with this tool.
5 comments:
Happy 100th! You blog for the same reasons as I do.
Ummm...happy 100th.
However, stuff like "In writing our blog posts, we are not skipping that essential step: taking an experience, reflecting on it, then applying our learning to new experiences. Our blog helps us map our learning on a daily basis, which encourages us and focuses us on constant improvement." focuses on life as a one step removed process. Using phrases like "map our learning" reinforces that process. Be a part of life. Don't have it as a one step removed exercise.
Congratulations! I already emailed you that I recognize much of what you learned, although I still am very much a beginning blogger. My interest in blogging is apart from capturing learning, the sharing of learning and getting to - if possible - global interactive dialogue. So as I wrote earlier I am quite interested to know what you learned about the customers.
I've also discovered a personal knowledge management spin-off from writing a blog.
I spent some time at the beginning working out what tags I wanted to use for future posts. Now I find when I am reading a book or an article I recognise an idea or a technique as being associated with one of my tags, and I write that tag in the margin of the document. It's really helping me structure ideas and spot connections (and gives me material for future blog posts too).
Cheers,
Stuart
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