Monday, December 19, 2005

Pause a second and think about blogging for educators

I think bogging can be a very useful practice for a practitioner because it gives an opportunity to chronicle and reflect upon your work. It's the reflection aspect that really helps us learn in my view. I think in the field of education we need to do more of this. My partner is a clinical social worker. She sees clients every day and after seeing them she write case notes into her files. These case notes are personal notes of hers as to issues surrounding the client's therapy. Invariably she is also chronicalling the strategies and approaches she is undertaking in the treatment of her clients. During this documentation process it gives her the opportunity to reflect upon her chosen approach, to look back at previous entries in the file, and to (re)consider if the chosen strategy is demonstrably effective or needs to be modified in some way. The aspect of reflection upon previous notes is the key here. So I use this blog to chronicle my activities as an Instructional Designer and Professor, and I often look back upon it for ideas, and also to get a sense of where I have been. I've been keeping this blog for almost a year and half and hopefully its value to my practice of reflection will increase as time passes.

1 comment:

Professor Phelps said...

Eric, After a long absence from the classroom, I accepted an adjunct teaching position at our local community college. I taught Macromedia Flash in the fall, and I am teaching Photoshop this semester.

As an experiment, I have started a blog that will go along with our classwork. My hope is that students will use it as a resource or review area, and also post their thoughts about the class. I would be very pleased for it to develop into a forum to discuss e-learning and mobile technology.

Time will tell. I'm new at this, and I think it will be interesting to see how it develops.