Tonight during a livesession conversation on "Using Connectivism" as a part of #ooe13, another participant, +Greg McVerry @jgmac1106, talked about publishing blog posts and then editing and revising them continuously after publishing. He mentioned that blogging sometimes acts as his life's rough draft, which I think holds a lot of truth for many bloggers out there. As he was sharing this, I reflected on my own blogging practices and realized that, more often than not, I take too long to filter through, edit, and revise my ideas before publishing them. The end result is often that I reach my historical "one blog post per month" limit.
I am determined to change this practice. I'm shifting my blogging mindset so that my blog writing better reflects my thinking as it evolves. This means getting comfortable with the idea of "failing in public" and "failing out loud". I'm not always going to be on the right track or know the right answer, but I'll definitely be doing a lot of thinking along the way. Our #ooe13 chat spent quite a bit of time discussing the value of taking risks through blogging and Tweeting to share and question our thinking, and to co-construct an understanding of a topic with our PLNs. Far too often, failure is seen as a negative thing instead of a chance to create meaning through developing understanding.
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| image: http://www.quotesonimages.com/109993/fail-first-attempt-in-learning-2 |
Failing has been on my mind a lot lately... I recently pinned a poster on Pinterest that said FAIL: first attempt at learning. I'm going to put it up in my office to help remind myself of the value of failure (I'll bet it might lead to some good conversations, too). As a teacher at a STEM school, we teach our students that failure is a very necessary part of the engineering and design process. Why shy away from failure as teachers? Or from sharing our experiences with failure? After all, the reflection that happens after failure often leads to great learning!
I am excited to embrace failure in public by using my blog as a sounding board instead of a final product. I'd love to hear your take on the idea of failing in public-- feel free to post a comment below!
Good on you Andrea. I've just decided to start to start blogging in a personal capacity and I've already got four posts... in draft... the one I'm working on has been revised 17 times??? (More to do with adding something when I think of it than an attempt at perfectionism).
ReplyDeleteAs someone who will be snoozing her way through the timeslots for webinars and Twitterchats, I seriously appreciate a post like this that gives me a quick summary, so I get a flavour before the recording is made available.
The main reason for holding back for me would be... once someone has read your blogpost once, surely they're not going to come back and look at edits. but then again, who am I really doing this for?
It's a great point as most people use the 'no time' excuse for not blogging enough (usually not enough by their own standards), and I know that with my work blog most of my posts don't get published until a week after they've been started. I don't see this as a bad thing though... it gives me chance to consider, to be more thoughtful, consider different angles. but I have no problem with rattling off this reply to your post... so how much am I just using that as an excuse?
Thanks Andrea - failing in public can often make a very positive impression. At a conference one of the speakers had a great presentation on the importance of failure and how in one engineering class the custom was to literally applaud failure.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/2013/03/02/ice13-reflections/
But of course I've written on failure a few times this year. Here is a picture I've created to encourage trying. http://www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/2013/07/24/mistakes/
A picture from facebook I liked http://www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/2013/06/16/failure-isnt-so-bad/
and my reflections on failure.
http://www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/2013/06/11/what-failure-should-look-like/