Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Why I blog and the perils of perfection paralysis

…why do I blog?

No,
I’m not some perfectly noble, wise, all knowing being. I’m a human
being and goodness knows I have my share of flaws. Many of these
reasons have evolved but they are my reasons. We all have reasons.

Vicki Davis outlines her reasons for blogging. I think they make good sense as a general reflection on blogging motives and focus for others, particularly those who are new to blogging or perhaps have had mediocre blogging experiences (either as bloggers or as readers of blogs).

In short Vicki talks about:

1. creating an archivable, searchable record of herself (something I’d put at the top of my list too)
2. experience being the greatest teacher (you need to experience to ‘know’)
3. the importance of voice (for me, this is important in terms of personal development but also in terms of practice-based research)
4. the power of encouragement (in her example, I think Vicki aptly conveys the message that it really is about connecting with others)
5. the power of ‘being part of it’ (this varies for me, depending on how ‘deep’ and often I choose to be engaged in ‘it’)
6. passion (a personal bent and driver, of course. Whether it’s a passion for teaching, or writing, or for simply displaying your passion through the blogging process/medium!)

Posts like Vicki’s are really useful in making the blogging process (and reflective processes) more transparent. As you’d note in the comments following Vicki’s post, others are appreciative of Vicki sharing her thoughts. Not only that, it’s inspired further questioning from commenters, which really highlights the connectedness blogging supports (and in turn is supported by).

So why do YOU blog (or not)?

PS. Thanks to del.icio.us/dnorman for this link.

technorati tags:blogging, edublogging, reflection, writing, voice, motivation, personal_development

Blogged with Flock

Lingro is one of the coolest web services I’ve come across – it enables you to open a website or document in the Lingro window and then get a translation or dictionary definition of every word on the page just by clicking on them.

You can also create a wordlist of every new term that you have learnt and play a simple flashcards game to test your knowledge of the translations or definitions. The possibilities of this site are enormous.

Using Lingro with Wikipedia

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Using Lingro with a word document

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Using the Lingro wordlist

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Playing the Lingro flashcard game

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