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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Value of Blogging - Thanks Tracy

As you know, I've started Pushing Harder for People to Blog - at my recent presentations, I've really pushed people hard. Luckily a few people take me up on my suggestion - and what makes me happy is when I see things like Tracy Hamilton saying
I attended the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering this year and one presentation really hit home for me. The speaker mentioned that since he had started blogging, a year previous, he had learned more from blogging and reading the blogs of peers than he had in his entire academic career. I though to myself “Ya, right? Who’s going to believe that?” He knew the audience was thinking the same thing and said to just try it and experience it yourself.

So the first thing I did upon my return was start my own and behold he was right. I truly believe I have learned a great deal from this simple process. Blogging is a wonderful way to learn directly from one another. Each day I read many different postings from people I then can summarize, analyze, draw my own conclusion and post my own ideas and thoughts on those same topics. By doing this one simple example of peer-to-peer learning/teaching I am able to learn a many new things each day and expand my existing knowledge on those topics of which I am already aware.
Tracy slightly misquoted me - I actually talked about the Big Question around Blogging and some of the responses - see Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog - particularly:
Karyn Romeis & Barry Sampson both said - I’ve learned more via blogging over the past year than I learned in the preceding several years!
Read more from Tracy on this in: eLearning 2.0 - I'm trying to DO IT

2 comments:

B.J. Schone said...

Tony,

I can certainly relate to Tracy... I started eLearning Weekly just a few hours after attending one of your sessions at the eLearning Guild conference!

Since then, I've had the pleasure of interacting with a good number of peers via my blog, and it's been an amazing learning experience. So - thank you!!

Tony Karrer said...

B.J. - I either didn't remember that - or hadn't put it together. That's very cool! It makes me feel like it's not entirely wasted breath - although it's a rather low percentage, eh?

What's also interesting about this is that I GET VALUE from both your blog and Tracy's blog. There's something interesting, weird about that - but I'm not sure I can put my finger on what it is.