spectator no more

The most inspirational educational blogging site I have discovered so far is http://www.weblogg-ed.com/ maintained by Will Richardson who describes himself as a blogvangelist

I just read something there that corresponds with a change that blogging already seems to be making to me, even though I've only been blogging for a week.

At first I thought I would quickly get onto blogging about my current hobby horse, all the fascinating, new web applications that I discovered over the holidays and which I feel have the potential to transform education. And I will be writing about them and I hope soon.

But something else is happening which is making me rethink my original intention. I'm getting feedback from others, comments on this blog, private email and face to face. I'm being pushed in new directions, forced to re-evaluate what I should be doing next.

From being an observer of blogs for over a year I've suddenly changed into an active participant, a blogger, the real thing, not that I really feel like the real thing, yet. I feel a pressure to think more, to try to write better and to connect with those who have made the effort to connect to me.

I think what I'm learning from my own limited experience and from what I read at Will's blog is that blogging is a significant experience in it's own right, that the act of blogging will be totally different from observing others blog. Anyway, here's part of what Will said:

But the one thing the blog allows me to do that I could not do easily in my classroom before is to link, to connect ideas, to make transparent my thinking about those ideas, and to have others link to them and do the same. I've been down this road before, I know, many times in fact. But it is the essential piece of Weblogs to me: blogs allow me to create content in ways I could not before, not just post what I could create otherwise in a different form. And in the essence of that creation I use and learn all of those skills that will serve me in my lifelong learning that were (I think) much more difficult for me to learn before: close reading, critical thinking about information, clear and concise writing for a real audience, editing, and reflection, all of it understanding that whatever truth I may put forth will continue to be negotiated by readers and more reading. This, by the very nature of the process, develops reading, writing, information, collaboration and computing literacies, literacies which I think most of us would agree are going to be crucial in navigating what's ahead.