A Humble Metablog

I’m taking a break from marking A1 (it’s going well; should be done by the weekend) to blog about blogging.

I’ve tried traditional blogging in some serious way at least a half-dozen times, with it never sticking for more than a year.   The activity always seemed far too time-consuming and undirected.  I also always felt strangely guilty in pretending to be a producer when I wasn’t a consumer (meaning that there’s nobody’s blog – or newspaper column, etc – that I’ve ever ‘followed’ even casually).   The motivations of altruism and vanity are never sufficient for me: I want greater value for my efforts.

The same has become true for microblogging/tweeting – I now use Twitter as a communications plumbing tool without actually browsing/consuming there in any significant way.

I created one of my current companies, CrowdTrust Technologies, to obtain better ‘clickstream’ value from the continuous  browsing/commenting/ideation activities of digital professionals.  Our flagship product, Gleanr, is about seeking the networking value of Facebook for global knowledge professionals.  It blends bookmarking, microblogging, tweeting, and more substantial creative works into a simple, instant streaming/channeling metaphor.   Our pitch is that you’re blogging for yourself primarily, with tangible, measurable benefits WRT to presence, reputation, influence and professional development. We’re still in prototype stage, but here are a few recent example ‘gleans’ from me related to learning and technology that you might find interesting:

KhanAcademy: a streamed article, with comment, from The Economist about an apparent emerging proof of the value of learning technologies in K-12 schools.

School Reform:  a streamed article, with comment, from The Economist about successful large scale school reform projects around the world, with an Ontario example.

The Future of Learning in Canada:  brief observations on the Canadian Council of Learning’s final report.  BTW, a critique of this report could be the basis of an entire graduate course…!

Thoughts welcome.

David

Posted in: Week 07: Blogs