Should all learning professionals be blogging? May 7, 2008

This is a very interesting article at http://www.downes.ca/post/38555 that discusses the pros and cons of learning professionals writing a blog.

Although the author, Stephen Downes doesn’t define what he means by ‘learning professional’ it is clear from the article that he is not restricting the use to those in the education profession; he means anybody in any profession that learns or passes on information to others. For this reason I recommend that any professional person who is curious about blogging reads this article.

Stephen presents a good case for blogging whilst at the same time saying that it is not the only multimedia tool that can be used to pass on knowledge. He lists; wikis, lists, voting, rss feeds, timelines, photosites, podcasts, vlogs, plogs, mashups etc. I confess I have not heard of some of these but I will look them up on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (is that incestuous?).

Stephen discusses how a busy professional might find the time to write a blog and he also describes a good case study of writing up the results of a meeting, that would apply to any organisation. He is clearly an advocate of blogging and his article makes a good case for it.

However, he misses out a couple of important points. Whilst describing how a blogger might find the time to write a blog he doesn’t describe how an equally busy professional might find the time to read a blog. A good argument here might be to suggest that one can choose a blogger that one wans to learn from and ignore others. Because blogging should reduce paper and email output, the reading of unecessary stuff is avoided giving time to read the relevant blogs. Also Stephen alludes to the fact that blogging reduces the need for face to face conversation and discussion which is not necessarily a good thing.

Even so this is an intersting article making one think about the practical uses of a relatively new multimedia tool.