Blogging: Personal vs. Group
Just fell through a post, and followed a comment or two that really got me thinking. The first one comes from James Farmer at incorporated subversion.
The point: Blogging is the exercise and development of personal presence, and this simply doesn’t happen on group or team blogs.
I then followed the link that sparked Farmer’s post off, Alan Levine’s “Does Not Blog Well With Others” post. Aside from the great title and intro, this post really is a thinker, and raises some great points that I know I want to consider more.
If I were a student in Blog School, the parental note they send home from my blog teachers might bear the comment, “Alan writes a lot, but he does not blog well with others”.
What I hope to get at by the end of this ramble is how, to me, in my opinion, this is not a universal rule… the power and enticement of blogging is the sense of ownership of a place of your own making. You own it, it is a relfection, sometimes fun house mirror distorted, of yourself. It is what the storytellers refer to as “finding your voice” (and using it). You are an editorial board of one, and the review process is instantaneous.
But as your own place, you have a lot of investment in what is there or a lot of reason to focus your energy there. It is yours and yours alone.” (Levine)
I find myself totally agreeing here. To me, one of the best parts of blogging is that it’s my turf. Noone else can tell me what to think, how to think, where to go with my thinking etc.
It is also, as Levine mentions, is where I’ve started to find my own voice, and where I’m free to polish, redefine, and develop it.
I also enjoyed his ideas around investment. When its yours, you invest with great freedom and generosity because it “feels like home.” (Levine par. 5)
From here I scrolled down to the comments where I really found myself identifying with Graham Wegner’s comments around his own efforts to team blog with a group of teachers.
I would like to repost his comment here, as it really speaks to the whole issue that I would like to address:
Alan, I post at two blogs - my own Teaching Generation Z
and one set up for my colleagues here at my school as we work through an IWB program. I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace. It has been mistaken by other bloggers as being one of “my” blogs but actually I wanted ActivBoarding to be everyone putting in their own bits and pieces on a regular basis so you only had to look in one spot to see what was going on in our school. But the fact that they are not means they don’t have the ownership you’re talking about to be committed or even bothered to do so. And I will always “save” my most pressing / important posts for my own blog so you could argue, my commitment to the team thing is a bit superficial as well. Yet a part of me still wants to keep it going! Very though provoking.
The part that really got to me was
“I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace.”
Ouch. I’m in the same boat. Where I work, we’ve set up a “team blog” as a space for our teaching staff to reflect on sessions in our professional development program.
Our teachers have been contributing, but only after much “encouragement” and “whip cracking.”
To their credit, the ones who do participate often create well thought out posts…but they are totally lacking in personality…ownership…authenticity, VOICE!
Their posts answer our PD questions, but in most cases the conversation is lost. This group blog space seems to have downgraded into “take in and vomit out.”
There is a great lack of deepness, of exploration and connecting to rest of the blogsphere. They simply answer their “homework” question and that’s it. Next post is when there is more homework to do.
That realization makes me feel…uncomfortable. I have a sneaky feeling that there may be no rescue for my team blog. Afterall, is blogging when you get a bunch of people to use blogging software? Don’t think so.
Is professional reflection working if you have to chase down and cajole the participants?
My whole point behind the group blog was to have a way to connect our teachers. We are usually scattered about the city teaching English classes. Connecting really happens on paydays when everyone comes in for money. But that’s payday! Our brains aren’t in professional development mode, they’re in “show me the money” mode. So PD talking and reflecting is not an option on these days.
So I thought….team blog. A great way for everyone to stay in touch with everyone else, and jointly explore and talk about what we’ve been covering in our PD sessions.
Sounds great on paper, but I’ve been struggling with getting past the “take off” phase since July of this year.
Just doesn’t seem to be working. It’s not really deep. There isn’t room for voice, at least not yet, and our so called “conversation” has turned into tacking comments onto “question” posts.
This is a weird post, and I do apologize. But more and more I’m starting to agree with Farmer, Levine, and Wegner. Group blogs likely don’t work too well.
I guess I’ve just invited myself to haul out the old drawing board and rethink all this.
I eagerly give you the floor…
Aaron,
Thanks for your followup comments and shared experiences. I would emphasize that this is my tiny limited experience, and I would never discount the possibility for a successful team blogging environment or space. I really do not want to see it suggested as a universal law.
There are many more factors at play, and anything with humans at the core have all kinds of external influences. But I never underestimate the role of motivation and the need for a critical mass of active players to make a shared space come alive.
For example, I’ve tried for a year and a half to get some distributed project teams to use a wiki, and their lack of use (some unfamilarity, some with a bad spammer experience), might lead a false conclusion of “wikis don’t work” and if the WikiPedia had stayed in the same realm of experience, it would not be the web darling it is.
It’s not the tools or the technology- its the people, what they do, how they connect (or not). Or maybe it is karma
Comment by Alan — November 16, 2005 @ 12:14 am
Hi Alan,
Thank you for your comments! I also would like to stipulate that this has been my experience as well. Perhaps last night I was just a little, in need of a rant. I don’t know. I’m sure not going to give up at trying to encourage team blogging, because it really could work.
Like you said, when humans are involved we’re dealing with a wide variety of variables and influences. That’s a great point. I think group blogging is a viable option, especially when you’re tring to work with a widely distributed group of people.
I guess what I need to take out of this is 1. Patience. I do need to remember that most of the teachers I work with are just meeting the blogsphere for the first time, and have heavy schedules to deal with.
It would be premature of me to give up, and I don’t want to do that.
Great things often take great amounts of time and effort to build…and professional development, is in my opinion, a great thing to work at.
It really is the people and how they connect - and if they aren’t connecting, then I need to really think about why.
Thanks again Alan.
Comment by Aaron Nelson — November 16, 2005 @ 8:05 am
Hey Aaron, this is the amazing thing about blogging. I work hard to put up relevant content on my blog (to me and hopefully others) and occasionally it crosses someone’s rss radar, but I see a post - the same one you saw from Alan - and it resonates with me personally so I type up a bit of a response and that is what strikes a chord immediately with someone else (in this case, you!)enough to not just provoke a response comment but to post to their own blog about it in classic Rip.Mix.Learn fashion. A great post - maybe I should re-reflect on your post in my blog as my comments currently only exist on other people’s webspace. And maybe this is why the team blog is not flourishing - they just don’t get this part of the whole blogging deal. Maybe if I work hard enough, they will. Cheers from down under, Graham.
Comment by Graham Wegner — November 17, 2005 @ 4:11 am
This all kind of points to the need to really understand these tools and the small pieces idea. I agree that it’s just not the same when you write in someone else’s space. (Even now, I am torn about commenting here or diving in on my own blog.) But in some ways, it would be nice if we were carrying on this thread in the same space. We can manufacture that with RSS feeds, I suppose, but I also think that this is a shift we have to deal with in terms of how we read, not just how and where we write. Don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m thinking…
Comment by Will Richardson — November 17, 2005 @ 5:50 am
Connective Reading
So this is a perfect example of the types of changes we’re going to have to get used to (and perhaps teach?) in terms of reading the Read/Write Web.
Trackback by Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom — November 17, 2005 @ 6:25 am
‘Falling Through Learning Layers’
Aaron’s post, Blogging: Personal vs. Group on the status of his team blog being in limbo was a very interesting exploration. First of all, I’ve gotta say I love the verbage, “I fell through a post” ( Blogging: Personal vs. Gr…
Trackback by Palimpsest redux — November 20, 2005 @ 9:48 pm
Pardon the tangent but I’d like to share my experience.
While owning a private plot of the blogosphere where I can build a home and entertain guests is certainly desireable,I’ve been essentially posting to an audience of one for a very long time. I’ve been finding my voice in an echo chamber and it’s gotten to be a bit lonely.
No, I’m not suggesting that a group blog is the answer. (I think I know the answer.)I guess I just want to warn folks away from being so in love with the blog of their own voice that they end up unread. Afterall, if we weren’t interested in having our posts read, we wouldn’t be putting our thoughts out there for the World (Wide Web)to see.
Comment by daniel — November 22, 2005 @ 12:00 am
Wow. This has certainly turned into a very interesting conversation. Thanks to all of you, Alan, Graham, Will, J.M.,and Daniel for your thoughts on this.
On Group blogging, Graham I think I’m in the same boat as you. I think the group of teachers I work with have not “gotten” the whole blog paradigm yet. They are largely digital immigrants, and “to blog” is still very much a foreign concept. I really like how you ended your comment. I think that is one of our missions, to work hard at being updated ourselves, and inviting and modeling others to hop on the bus too.
Will…I’m still there too. The thinking it all through. You capture it well when you say that it’s like feeling torn when you go to write in someone else’s space. Yep. It’s just not the same. You don’t feel at home, you can’t explore where you want to explore…you just have to stay seated on the seat the host showed you to (most of the time anyway.) There’s just something limiting about group blogs, at least in the ones I have been involved in. Are those limits bad things? No. I don’t think so. I think if the host is good, the conversation can be great. It’s just getting to the point of being a great host and helping the guests “feel more at home.” That’s where I am seeing my focus moving…just over these last few days as I’ve thought all this stuff through. It’s about making your guests feel at home. It’s about helping your guests feel at ease with their surroundings (blogging) and showing them…modeling…how to do it.
Still thinking…
Daniel,
Great comment. I was thinking about it yesterday…and this silly word problem came to my mind: If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?
While we know it did, the idea of it is pretty relevant to your comment I think. Professional development should never be a solitary pursuit. We learn best from seeing what others do. We grow the tallest when we stand on the shoulders of someone else.
I think a group blog could grow into something like this, but I think a better application of a blogfolio is doing what you’ve started doing. Blog away on yours, and start exploring the blogs of others…commenting, participating in the conversation, blogging about what they blog on - thinking about what they had to say, reading deeper on the matter, reflecting, then putting your take on it…and then publishing to your blog (and trackback it to the firestarter.) That’s how conversations get started. By learning how to listen. Think. Express, and listen again. Never alone. Never in an echo chamber.
My two cents….
Comment by Aaron Nelson — November 23, 2005 @ 8:28 am
yes, group blogs are special
there’s a great discussion of personal versus group blogging going around. aaron nelson gives a good overview in his post teacher in development :: blogging: personal vs. group. as the editor/blogmeister of a team blog - in fact, one of
Trackback by e e learning — November 30, 2005 @ 6:15 pm
Wow! I am not alone in the world after all. I just became involved in the blogosphere through a grant with my state, Alabama. I was so excited about the ideas behing blogging that I seemed to go overboard. I teach technology to 952 third through fifth graders. I have set up blogs to get the students talking about their project based assignments. Those blogs are flying. However, the blogs for teachers that I set up to aid in powerful conversations of professional books we are reading and not working at all. I have even stayed after school in the computer lab to help anyone with blogging. So far, no takers. The Superintendent, Director of Curriculum, and my principal are the only ones who have blogged. I am getting very frustrated with them! I was reading another blog earlier about not having time to blog. He said it is not that he has the time to blog, but it is how he choses to take part in professional development. I hope teachers at my school will learn from the students.
Comment by April — December 31, 2005 @ 10:45 pm