One of the great aspects of blogs is that your content is published to a potential worldwide audience. However when you start off in a purposeful blog, you realise that it could take a while before anyone else seeks to interact with you. Now that's not a bad thing because if you start off blogging for yourself, the topics will be genuine and help you to find your voice. As time goes on, the interactivity and the connections to other people become important to connect your work to what you read about in your Bloglines feeds. Now my blog doesn't attract a lot of comments so I can tell you that all that do are treated like gold. First, it's proof that someone is reading my work and secondly, maybe my blog has contributed to their learning and then their comments definitely contribute to mine!

So a recent post of mine, Finding Time To Blog, prompted Canadian educator James Matthew to leave a comment and to "rip and remix" my post in his own blog Palimpsest redux.

I just stumbled onto a post by Graham over at Teaching Generation Z that suggests this problem of getting peers to buy into the importance of teaching (or even implementing in their own practice) the use of social software:

Now I can't afford to be snobby to anyone so I commented on his remix.

James, thank you for the comments re: Finding Time To Blog. I have to say I don't feel like a veteran teacher especially here down under where the average age of a teacher in South Australia is 50 years old. I have been involved in ICT technologies for most of my teaching career and have always looked for the bleeding edge even if I've never quite been there ......

And here's where comments can become a conversation because Matthew then replied to my comment. With this new way of weaving learning strands together I have a few choices - (i) leave another comment that answers some of the questions and issues he raises or (ii) do a remix of my own to show how the pieces can fit together. Here's a key point from Matthew's reply comment:

I think the biggest effect blogging has had on me is that it fuels my appetite for learning…I read a lot more now, because I want to have something to say. If this is the only benefit I ever see, then that is great, but I see the potential for so much more.

I couldn't agree more. I still haven't moved past blogging for personal learning but I definitely want it to be part of my classroom practice in 2006. There are only six weeks left in the Aussie school year so my focus is to keep improving my craft here and try to drag a few of my teaching colleagues along for the ride. So, Matthew, if you're reading this, watch this blog for developments. Anyone else, join the conversation and point me towards more learning opportunities.