Writing in order to write

After a hiatus of over a month due to moving house, school holidays, visitors etc. I'm having to pick up on writing again.  I've done a lot of reading in the interim - for my course and around my course and for an article I'm co-authoring for the IASL conference. I'm finding if I don't put my thoughts down I tend to dream about them way too much. And believe me, dreaming about virtual networks, new literacies and various multi-player online games that I don't play myself and only read about is no fun.

I did encounter an interesting blog post on the value of blogging as an academic (Not that I'd pretend to be an academic - even as the conceptualisation of what an academic is shifts). It is a really good article and I'd recommend you have a look at it. I agree completely with the points. When I write, I'm forced to think more deeply about what I've read. I have to link it to other things, I need to bring things together that were bouncing around at the edge of my consciousness into focus.  I do miss the days when blogging was more social and posts would get many comments and communities would spring up around them. There is a bit of that going on, but not nearly as much as before. I think discourse has moved onto other social media platforms and I think that blogging as a pseudo academic tool may have flogged itself to death - if everyone is blogging, who is reading the blogs?

My son, the reluctant reader and even more reluctant writer has started reading Zoe Sugg's Girl Online and is thinking about starting a blog. He already has an avid Instagram following from the days that he was passionate about photography, and I'm sure would blog in an equally competitive way (is this type of competition a social media thing or a boy thing or just a thing?). I said I'd support him and that it was probably a good idea, given that blogs were more traditionally a "girl" thing, and he'd probably find an audience in kids like him.

Writing, longer writing, beyond 140 characters or passing on liked posts on social media is something valuable, as it is transformational and productive, not just consumptive, which is the easy part of our digital world.  And now my focus needs to shift to my assignment.

Meanwhile back at my other blog...

For my current course ETL401 Introduction to Teacher Librarianship I'm required to keep a blog on Wordpress in their "thinkspace".   After a couple of months of Wordpress I must say I'm still not terribly good at it, nor convinced of its superiority (at least not for someone who isn't doing this professionally) but anyway, if you don't find anything here, I'll be there.  They're named the same so as to avoid any confusion. I've just not worked out how to double post there and here, without having administrator rights "there" so as a compromise I'll just link the lastest posts from either blog to the other.

Blogging frenzy

Apologies in advance for what may appear as a blogging frenzy!  After too much vacation and free time and working and getting back to school activities and a kid with a broken hand (we think, in plaster until a new xray today), I'm catching up with my work for INF506, which involves - you guessed it - MORE BLOGGING!

I also finally got around to copying and pasting my research into online social networks for international school librarians in Asia, and I need to do about 3 more OLJ (Online Learning Journal) entries for module 4 before embarking on module 5.   It's not true I "have" to do them, I think we're only assessed on 3 of our entries, but the assignments are interesting and topics worth thinking about and doing further research into, so I'm kind of making myself do it.

I'm going to have to add a few pictures to keep people interested ...  Or maybe a video.  Yes, I'll add a time lapse video my son made of our evening walk in the Botanic Gardens.  The speeded up nature makes it epitomise life here in Asia better I think!

Time Lapse Singapore - Raphael Diederen

Social networking - the dark side

I've been on the internet a long, long time.  There was some primitaive stuff going on when I did my first degree around the mid-80's (that's 1980's) but we only really got it going at home in 1994 - and then we were living in Brazil, where and when at that time, even having a home phone line was a luxury.  I remember hours and hours trying to get things up and running with a techie mate of mine, both of us with broken Portuguese, the old black screens with green writing and lots of C backslashes.  Besides email, social media for me only started in 2006 when we moved from Spain to Hong Kong and I started blogging.   And I discovered the wonderful community you could create through blogging, but I also found the dark side of trolls and anonymous comments that didn't add much to the conversation except to satisfy some need in the writer.   Finally, when things got too personal and my thick skin had been worn down enough, it just didn't seem worth carrying on, and besides that we'd moved countries and a lot of what I'd written was no longer interesting or relevant or current, so I just shut it down.  But I did make some truely wonderful friends through the experience, and they've remained friends, so the virtual to the reality.

Fast forward to now, and I'm using Pinterest and Flipboard for my work, and also dabbling in them a little privately.  Full disclosure - I have a child with ADHD.  It's not a secret.  I'm not ashamed of it.  So when I come across things on ADHD or related matters, I flip them into an ADHD flipboard, and I keep track of nice infographics and articles and graphics and things on it in Pinterest.    Out of politeness and in the spirit of the social side of the internet, and being supportive of other people who take the time and trouble to curate things on the matter, I also "follow" their boards if I've pinned something from it.

And they follow me back.  But it can be dark.  So, recently one of the people I followed on the matter then followed me back and started inviting me to all sorts of boards along the lines of domestic violence, abused people, children of abuse and all sorts of psychological matters that, while I'm sympathetic to, just doesn't have relevance to my life.  I had one of those "oops" moments, and kind of felt like I was being stalked, or having a bible basher (sorry, value judgement) put their foot into my living room door.

Will it stop me using social media?  No.  It just makes me more aware, and maybe I won't follow someone quite so quickly without looking at the context of their other pins first.  Am I glad it happened? Yes.  Because I'm the parent of two pre-adolescents.  And it can and will happen to them, and I'm real glad it happened to me first, so we can talk about it, and they'll know what it is, how it can happen and how to respond to it when it does.