Rethinking blogging
I used to post on this blog almost every day. Lately I haven’t been posting much. I am not worrying too much about it, but have been thinking about why.
I think it is largely to do with changes in my work. In the past, I was primarily a researcher, working on all manner of reports and projects, mostly in the field of elearning and knowledge development. My primary mode of work was desk research: in other words I read a lot. I can remember twenty years ago when I first moved to Bremen in Germany I used to travel about once every four months to the University of Surrey at Guildford (which was the easiest UK university to get to from Gatwick airport). I would spend thirty pounds on a photocopying card, spend an entire day in the university archives and travel back with photocopies of 60 or 70 research papers. I kept these for years before I realised I never looked at them. By 2000 of course, access to research was moving to the web. One of the big changes this heralded was the arrival of grey literature. Interestingly this term which was much used at the time, seems to have gone out of fashion, as it has slowly become accepted that web based materials of all kinds have at least some validity in the research process. So called grey literature gave access to a wider range of thinking and ideas than could be gained from official journal papers alone, although the debate over how to measure quality is far from resolved.
And to bring this up to date, the emergence of Open Educational Resources, Open Journals and specialist networks like the excellent ResearchGate, have increased the discoverability of research ideas and findings.
I used to enjoy the research work. And it was easy to blog. There would always be something in a paper, on a web site, in a network to comment on. I wrote a lot about Personal Learning Networks, a popular subject at the time, and through speaking at conferences and seminars got new ideas for more blog posts. But there were some frustrations to this work. Although we talked a lot about PLEs and the like, it was hard to see much evidence in practice. Our ideas were often just that: ideas which had at best limited evaluation and implementation in the field. Most frustratingly, few of the projects were
