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I Blog Therefore I Am?

There seems to have been a few blogs bouncing around in my feeds of late. These include Deb Hicks' 'Why Blog', Tom Whitby's 'Why Blogs and Who Needs Them Anyway' and Peter DeWitt's 'The Benefits of Blogging'. It kind of occurred to me that I hadn't really ever stated, nor really thought about, why I have chosen to blog. I have therefore decided to have a go at providing some of my reasons:

  1. Scratching an itch. Often while reading, there are things that stick out, that prop the ears, the spike the imagination, that remain like an itch. A blog is a way of  responding to these things, somehow alleviating the irritation.
  2. Being connected. I love being connected, following various threads of thought, commenting, tweeting and reaching out to others, but sometimes a responding needs to be something more substantial. A blog is one avenue that allows this.
  3. Critical engagement. I read on the wall in a coordinators office the other day the statement that 'behaviour unchallenged was behaviour accepted'. I kind of feel that the same can be said about ideas. Online environments allow for encounters of all kinds, a part of this meeting of ideas is a need to critique. Not so that we may be 'right', rather that we may be wrong, in order to become better. As Seth Godin puts it in talking about 'failing often': "Fail often. Fail in a way that doesn’t kill you. This is the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t."
  4. Life long learning. What I love most about writing a blog is that it allows a space to follow through on different points of learning, a kind of thought experiment, a place to grow ideas, in order that I may develop further. At its heart, a blog allows for the cultivation of seeds of inquiry, exploring and discovering what they may produce.
  5. Lead by example. J. Hillis Miller once posed the question: "How can we teach reading if we are not readers ourselves?" I think the same argument can be applied to tools for working in the 21st century. I do not think that 'teachers' have to be in control, but they do need to be the 'lead learner' as Joe Mazza would put it. To me, that means getting involved from the inside - testing, trialling, questioning, understanding - not just commenting from the outside, and especially not just when you are forced to.
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Here are some of the reasons why I choose to blog. Although I am sure there are more, it is at least a start. So what are the different reasons you blog?
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