Perspectance

Most people at NorthernVoice, a blogger’s unconference that took place this past weekend in Vancouver, B.C. blogged in some fashion during the conference about the conference. Many tweeted. A tiny bit of tweeting was all I could muster. I was in a relaxed, chilled receptive canvas mode – stark contrast to last year. Took lots of notes and used the time as a soft mirror I could fold up and look at later. Since a fair number of participants (like myself) might be reviewing tagged blogs this week, I want to write something about my takeaways. The best thing for me about NorthernVoice is new online friends, and those can start with the sketchiest of blogged ideas.

The session that keeps sticking with me was one of the last ones: “Navigating the space in between – Create relationships, not distance” . It was a sure bet going in due to the everthoughtful Barbara Ganley, Laura Blankenship and Nancy White.

A Tale of two Dances was a neat little video that set the tone and they had us draw a picture of a face together with a partner to illustrate how we are constantly straddling across boundaries to connect and co-create.

Laura stated, “We both have left comfortable spaces.” She knew how to do the online world and was wanting to be there, but wants to try and make some connections outside, into her neighborhood. Her community neighbors are not online. How does she connect? How does she find the ones who know what Twitter is? She feels like she is in the limbo space and doesn’t know how to do the dance yet. She knows she’s not the only one trying to bridge that space.

Barbara is very comfortable in that space in between, at the edges, with the chaos. As a Middlebury College veteran faculty member, she regularly moved her students to that edge space, “but students are one thing. How do you move people in neighborhoods to those places?” She asked, “How do we use the boundaries and borders as places of deep learning potential, to find one another for help?”

Nancy talked about how it’s “some of me, some of we”, and how “the network creates a whole new me.” She asks, “Where are the juicy spots for each of those ways of being?” and then answers for herself, ” It’s about noticing the transitions and using them positively.”

Then they asked the group what people are doing to make the crossovers a rich space. What are people doing?

With far too little time, some people challenged the premise that the gap needed bridging. Dana Boyd’s identity work came up and brought back for me ongoing struggles with choosing and defining personal and public identities: “Some people need to rely on the separation provided by the two worlds.”

Someone, (I think maybe a thoughtful Heidi, but correct me if I’m wrong) stated what for me is the point I have been mulling over since the weekend,

“It’s a consciousness thing. It takes some self-confidence and/or foolhardiness. It takes not caring about what people think of you, maybe. It’s more taking more comfort in one’s identity. Learning to be ok with someone not liking that.”

For months, I have felt so stuck and befuddled with my not blogging despite the urge, that this message was a shiny key. Traversing worlds… integrating digital and embodied identities, requires a certain self-knowledge to even know if, when, why, and what one could, should, would want to BE present and engaged off and/or online. How can I know when I spend far too much time in front of my closet wondering which clothing is me today? What makes me so full of adolescent-type ambiguity the older I get?

I wonder, just a little bit, if my state of unease and mixed emotions toward on or offline social engagement has something fundamental to do with my serious intentional empty nest choice to return to school and delve into this ever emerging field as an online professional technology steward . Perhaps my choice keeps me in a more permanant transition forever swimming the tidal margins. Perhaps I am simply adapting to this brackish condition and need to realize my salt and fresh, off and online worlds allow me to flourish in the mix -but it’s still me BEING in the middle here. What do I want to BE doing?

And if you have read along this far and anything resonates, what is your story? Do you also see yourself in some kind of life transiton that overlays your online profession? How are you adapting (or not) your identity to the conditions of emergence?

This word cloud was created by Anne Mirtschin using using wordle

A CPsquare colleague, Jeffrey Keefer is considering the pros and cons of having his college students blog. I got a lot out of being required to blog in our Online Masters in Educational Technology program at Pepperdine, so I replied to Jeffrey’s Twitter request for advice. Anne Mirtschin, another teaching Tweeter I follow, coincidentally had just tweeted her blog post on good student blogging, so I shot that over to Jeffrey. Then today while I was researching something about Ning for another colleague, I discovered this older blog post of Phil Gomes about Ning as a teaching tool. Aside from considering Ning as a blog platform, Phil addresses a central issue of whether to make the college student blog network public or private:

In terms of remaining open:

Certainly provides a real-world experience, and you won’t be too happy in PR these days unless you can handle some level of exposure.

In terms of keeping it private:

Though I did pretty darn well in my undergrad studies, I’m not entirely sure I’d have wanted my instructor requiring that my academic progression be spilled out there for all to see.

My advice to anyone considering blogs for students is to first identify the purpose of the blogging. I think the purpose of required blogging in my OMET experience was first and foremost to afford (make provision for) student reflection throughout the learning process. Our blogs were private – so that just our cadremates and profs could see them and respond to them. It was hard at first “spilling out” reflections for all my peers to see, but was a significant practice to develop. Enjoying a blog network with everyone who was in the same boat strengthened our notion of social learning (a core theme for the program), and indeed initiated me to true social networking online. However, I would not have written so freely if the blog would be discoverable later by whoever out in the world might stumble upon my fledgling attempts at public verbage.

Getting back to the instructional design purposes, if the goal is less to encourage student reflection and more about having students engage the world, or learn what blogging is all about, they might be tempted to make blogs public. I would consider the length of the term where blogging will be required, and the potential incentives or disincentives. It takes a good bit of time to generate traffic and more importantly, stresses a person to consider their public digital identity. (I’m certainly struggling with this now even as someone who wants to engage the world.) Perhaps educational technology goals could be met with a menu of blogging options on the continuum of private to public, where some students may simply engage in responding to blogs on a topic of interest or join a social network with an associated profile, while others might start their own blogs on any platform of choice.

I like Ning’s options for having a front page you can keep open to the world and private areas where members can blog just with each other. Others have used some of the big blogging platforms to do this too. Students could be encouraged to do both on a Ning network created for the class that included both options.

Finally, Brian Kelly is enriching the world at his Wordpress site describing experimental Higher Ed institutional use of blogs in the UK. It is rich because of his openness in sharing his processes.