This WordPress blog dates back to June 2008.

I have Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous blog accounts too.

This week a friend, Darrell Cobner, asked me to write about blogging. He is an accomplished blogger and I was delighted that he asked me.

Darrell’s request was for me to address:

• What is blogging?
• Why blog?
• What is the impact?
• What are the rules of engagement?

I started drafting this blog post just after I had read John Kessel’s delightful Celebrating Together post on the USA Volleyball blogs site. His opening paragraph addresses implicitly Darrell’s questions:

Just finished our annual meetings in Salt Lake City, where all the USAV leaders come to share their season’s experiences and best practices and plan ahead to grow the game anew. This being an Olympic Year, our CEO Doug Beal shared a special powerpoint at the Congress, celebrating the achievements of volleyball in the USA, aka USA Volleyball in his State of the Game.  It is shared here, since so many of you reading this blog could not be in Salt Lake, yet you are growing the game so well in your part of our nation – we wanted you to celebrate too.  CLICK HERE to download and read it, you will learn a lot about how the Team behind the Team, which is all of us, are doing at USA Volleyball.

Explicitly, here are my thoughts on Darrell’s questions.

What Is Blogging?

Wikipedia has a very clear description of blogging:

A blog is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject.

Stephen Downes adds that:

Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what may be covered in a blog. It is common for people to write blogs to describe their work, their hobbies, their pets, social and political issues, or news and current events.

The uptake of blogging was accelerated by easy to use blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress. Both provided and continue to provide ways for the uncomplicated upload of content. This makes blogging a very personal activity.  The author creates, uploads and monitors content of the blog.

In recent years Twitter has made microblogging an everyday activity that enables the exchange of short sentences, web links, and pictures.

Why Blog?

I mentioned John Kessel’s  Celebrating Together post on the USA Volleyball blogs site earlier. I return to it here to help explain why blog.

In the paragraph I quoted John makes the following points:

• Just finished our annual meetings in Salt Lake City, where all the USAV leaders come to share their season’s experiences and best practices and plan ahead to grow the game anew.
• Our CEO Doug Beal shared a special powerpoint at the Congress, celebrating the achievements of volleyball in the USA.
• It is shared here, since so many of you reading this blog could not be in Salt Lake, yet you are growing the game so well in your part of our nation – we wanted you to celebrate too.  CLICK HERE to download
• You will learn a lot about how the Team behind the Team, which is all of us, are doing at USA Volleyball.

John’s post exhibits two fundamental aspects of the why blog discussion:

1. There is an unconditional commitment to sharing experiences and resources.
2. The topic is of the author’s choice and narrative style.

I see blogging as a voluntary contribution to a community. Whenever I attend a conference or workshop I blog live so that those not attending can access information if they wish.

An example is my blog posts from the Computer Science in Sport Conference (Special Emphasis: Football) at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany in 2011.

I blog to share my interests in performance and this leads me to share data from my research activities.

An example is my blog posts about performance at the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

What I find particularly exciting about this approach is:

• There is no expectation that anyone will read any post.
• Occasionally people comment on the posts and this leads to thought-provoking exchange.
• It contributes to a world that flourishes through reciprocal altruism.

What Is The Impact?

Blogging offers an immediate way to share information or discuss ideas.

I have posted 619 times to my blog since June 2008. This is a rich record for me of items of interest to me and a cloud resource I draw upon when meeting others interested in learning, teaching, coaching and performance. To date I have had 112,000+ visitors to the site.

I saw a big spike in readership during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Thereafter searches on Google yield some of my posts.

The availability of alerts to blog posts on topics or by a particular author has transformed the impact of blog posts.

In contemplating the impact of blog posts I am mindful of Todd Sieling’s advice about slow blogging.

Slow Blogging is a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time, switching between banality, crushing heartbreak and end-of-the-world psychotic glee in the mere space between headlines. The thing you wished you said in the moment last week can be said next month, or next year, and you’ll only look all the smarter.

I am conscious that if we are to use blog posts as an indicator or reach and impact then we must engage in slow blogging.We must think too about the tags we use to point to the slow blogging outputs.

I think microblogging with Twitter offers an alternative for the immediate response to events.

What Are The Rules Of Engagement?

It is a public space

Back in 2007 Tim O’Reilly suggested that “I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn’t come through any kind of regulation it would come through self-regulation.” One of his seven recommendations was:

Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

Kate Carruthers’ advice

In my own blog I have an About page. On it I say:

This is a personal blog. Kate Carruthers has a great guide to rules of engagement for personal blogs. I try to follow her rules.

Kate’s rules are great!

• This is my personal blog and I write it for my own personal satisfaction.
• Readers are encouraged to comment, debate and discuss.
• I moderate all comments and publish most, unless they appear (to my totally subjective gaze) to be defamatory, spammy, hate-mongering, not particularly constructive, or just plain rude/crude.
• It’s fine to disagree with me, but I’m unlikely to publish your comment unless you display a modicum of style and intelligence.
• if you do not provide a real name/identity/email I may choose not to publish your comments.
• Real people who stand by their comments are cool!
• This blog discusses ideas but does not purport to provide formal business, technology, psychology or finance advice.
• Readers should seek (and probably pay for) advice of that nature from a professional source.
• The content on this website is provided “as is” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
• The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent views of any clients or employers in any way.
• Nothing posted here should be considered official or sanctioned by any of my clients or employers or any organisation I am affiliated with.
• Feel free to quote liberally from this blog if you want – please link back in the best web tradition if you use any material provided here and give credit for material used.

Sharing openly and open about sharing

Richard Byrne has a helpful post from 24 May 2011 that contains some detailed advice about:

• What to do when you see your blog posts being stolen
• What to do if you want to reuse someone’s blog post(s)

In Conclusion

I have written this post from the perspective of a person who seeks to share through blogging. I recognise that there are other motives to blog.

I am excited by the reflective potential of blogs in education and sport settings.

I facilitated a Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit at the University of Canberra last semester. One of the requirements of the unit was to develop a blog as a journal. I have compiled a list of the 60 blogs produced by the students on a Wikiversity page.

Perhaps the next discussion with Darrell will be about wikis … but not before some more of John Kessel’s post:

The final night of meetings before play begins, is the “Boyce Banquet” in honor of Dorothy C. Boyce.  Dorothy joined USAV in 1952 as a consultant on women’s volleyball and took on many leadership roles over her 22 years of involvement, including being USAV Vice President for a decade.  Traditionally, I sit at the banquet with Mike Hulett, who, if you don’t know of him…well dang it you should. I knew what was coming, as I had contributed a lot of photos of Mike, having been with him for decades as he helped head coach in our USA Paralympic programs. So take time to read the link award below, and watch the video ( CLICK HERE to watch) that I took of his surprise in being honored with USA Volleyball’s highest award, the Frier (named after the USAV leader who almost singlehandedly got volleyball into the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, just one of those things that we all should know and celebrate too…).  Mike’s achievements are something we ALL should celebrate in volleyball.  Just another thing USA Volleyball does to help volleyball for all, including the disabled of all ages.

http://usavolleyball.org/news/2012/05/25/mike-hulett-selected-as-usavs-2012-frier-winner/48119?ngb_id=2

Thank you for finding time to read this post. There are some other posts about blogging here.

Its predictor is updated at the start of each month.

The June update is:

Other posts in this blog about medal predictions can be found here.

I was revisiting some of the content of the unit this week (Coach as Performer, Sharing and Presenting Information).

Whilst doing this I came across Paul Keating’s 1992 speech in Redfern.

In the speech (at the Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People) he said:

• The starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
• We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?
• The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain.
• There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through fifty thousand years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of disposession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation.

Deborah Cheetham is working on a song cycle based on this speech.

I am going to use the speech the next time I am involved in #SCP. Amongst many issues it raises is the relationship between a speech writer and a public speech, between the ideas on paper and their voice.

Photo Credit

Paul Keating

I see the Centre as a physical tipping point in my own thinking about and practice in educational technology.

I like the idea of being InSPIRED and hope to spend much of my nomadic time at the University in the Centre.

The Hiperwall there is just one of the many tools for engagement and connection.

The imminent opening of the Centre has encouraged me to think about the ethos that underpins connected and emerging communities.

Thanks to a link from Stephen Downes to a MediaShift Idea Lab post by Jonathan Stray about visualising documents, I discovered a 2009 post by Dan Schultz that helped me clarify my thoughts.

I have written about reciprocal altruism in this blog and I have been exploring the invisibility of openness. Dan’s post was an excellent catalyst for my thinking. His post is titled In Search of a Community That Takes ‘Me’ Out of Social Media.

He concludes that:

Community tools exist, but they are drastically underpowered… As a result, they are drowned out by the far more successful alternatives… To change this, we need something that can:

1. Host niche communities without isolating them from the rest of the world.
2. Give individuals a chance to shine without letting their egos dominate the content.
3. Attract enough people to drive collective intelligence, while maintaining the level of granularity needed to provide a truly personalized experience.

That isn’t too much to ask for… right? I personally believe that these systems will be the key to meeting community information needs.

I think we will have an opportunity to address these issues in and through the InSPIRE Centre. The Centre:

is a learning commons, a place to imagine, experiment and design new ways of working and learning digitally. INSPIRE services highlight quality teaching and contemporary learning practices through staying connected to global initiatives and trends about learning design and design thinking. We focus on a futures perspective and developing foresight, not just knowledge and skills.

I am hopeful that my visits to the Centre will help me explore learning ethnographies of the emergence of inspirational practice.

Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know “how” to think, instead of “what” to think. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman published an interesting study of the Nobel Prize winners who were living in the United States in 1977. She discovered that six of Enrico Fermi’s students won the prize. Ernst Lawrence and Niels Bohr each had four. J. J. Thompson and Ernest Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates. This was no accident. It is obvious that these Nobel laureates were not only creative in their own right, but were also able to teach others how to think creatively.

In his post Michael identifies eight strategies “that are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art and industry throughout history.” Geniuses:

• LOOK AT PROBLEMS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS
• MAKE THEIR THOUGHTS VISIBLE
• PRODUCE
• MAKE NOVEL COMBINATIONS
• FORCE RELATIONSHIPS
• THINK IN OPPOSITES
• THINK METAPHORICALLY
• PREPARE THEMSELVES FOR CHANCE

Photo Credit

Horizon Glow & the Conjunction

By coincidence I was think about some correspondence with a PhD student about authentic leadership.

Serendipity brought me news of a series of CPA interviews with Neil Armstrong.

Alex Malley, the CEO of CPA, interviewed Neil Armstrong and observed that:

Look he’s got an extraordinary humility, there’s no question about that and when you look at what they were able to do in ’69 in relation to the journey they went on; these are things we just haven’t seen for a long time.

His capability to constantly talk about team; to have shown the world something that was beyond their mind and just getting the balance right between initiative and entrepreneurship and risk management, whereas these days we seem to be telling each other we can’t do things because of the risk and yet they did that literally on a wing and a prayer.

What is special about the four interviews with Neil Armstrong is that they offer a rare insight into his thinking.

He does not do a lot of interviews so I believe these are outstanding resources with which to contemplate leadership, risk and humility.

Driving home in the twilight did not seem so arduous on Thursday particularly after I heard Neil Armstrong say of the lunar landing:

Then the computer showed us where it intended to land and it was a very bad location, it was on the side of a large crater about – I suppose 100 or 150 metres in diameter. So I took over manually and flew it like a helicopter out to the west direction; got into a smoother area with not so many rocks, found a level area and was able to get it down there safely before we ran out of fuel.

Photo Credit

Neil Armstrong

The title of his thesis is:

The Role of the Internet and Online Technologies in Destination Choice for Australian Cycle Tourists.

This is the third PhD to be submitted for examination since the establishment of the National Institute of Sport Studies at the University of Canberra.

It is the first thesis to emerge from a cross faculty collaboration. Dennis is registered for study with the Faculty of Business, Government and Law. I have been his primary supervisor from NISS in the Faculty of Health.

Some of Dennis’s findings about cycle tourists:

• They are very active in their use of online technology to explore their options for cycling away from their home base.
•  They seek general information about accommodation and natural attractions at a location, albeit with some cycling specific aspects in view, such as cycle friendly accommodation and cycle friendly routes to attractions.
• Transportation options to reach a destination were identified as important, but with options that allow them to take their own bicycles with them.
• Information about  cycling related facilities is important to this group, as is information about cycling events, specifically from a participant’s viewpoint.
• Information about organised cycling tours was seen as important to many in this group.
• Bicycle hire (especially overseas) and access to drinking water were identified as important information items and the weather forecasts are more important to cyclists than to many other tourists who have options to avoid bad weather.
• Age is not a barrier to the use of technology, and in many respects those that are not time poor (older/retired) are just as active online as their younger counterparts.

Overall, Dennis points out that:

The standout feature of this research in regards to cycle tourism is that road safety for cyclists came through as the most significant aspect of cycling away from the home region. Information related to safe routes for cycling was paramount in the needs of this group, and this has significant implications for cycling specific maps both hard copy and online.

Immediately after handing in his thesis for examination, Dennis packed his bags to present a a paper on his work at the Velo City Conference in Vancouver.

The story indicates that:

• England’s friendly against Belgium at Wembley on 2 June will be used to test the Hawk-Eye goal-line technology system.
• Independent testers from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology and representatives from FIFA will monitor the system.
• It will not be available for use by the match officials on 2 June.
• The Hawk-Eye system was tested in a English minor league cup final between Eastleigh and AFC Totton in April.
• An alternative system, GoalRef, has undergone trials at two Danish league matches this month.
• The International Football Association Board will consider reports from these trials to consider the introduction of goal-line technology at its special meeting in July.

Photo Credit

Goal!

We were exploring how to develop a Wikiversity resource to support continuing professional development.

I feel more comfortable each time I use Wikiversity but I have lots to learn. I am hoping that this project will help me do so.

James Neill is helping with the back office part of this project and the whole idea is the brainchild of Holly Northam.

I am hopeful that this project will have the energy exuded by Ian Miller in his blogging.

Ian aims with his eclectic mix of reflections, tutorials and articles to:

educate, to stimulate some introspection, to inform and amuse. More importantly, they are offered in the hope that they might be used as a jumping off point to inspire other nurses to think about their own practice, to explore the latest research, best practice guidelines, and to search out and deepen their knowledge, improving the quality of care they deliver.

• Locate an existing professional portfolio relevant to you and deconstruct by identifying and extracting key concepts and features.
• Plan your own professional portfolio by integrating and organising the key concepts and features you have identified, as well as any other concepts and features you wish to integrate.
• Identify the range and types of tools available for portfolio implementation and choose one that suits your needs.
• Begin construction of your own professional portfolio.
• Identify good practices for application in your own eportfolio teaching strategies.

The workshop is taking place as the InSPIRE Centre is completing preparations for a grand opening next Monday. These preparations include the installation of a Hiperwall.

RT @INSPIREDU2:

The awesome @Hiperwall coming to INSPIRE soon … just ask @munnerley@rfitzgerald

The workshop comes at the end of a semester when 70 students on the #SCP12 unit have developed their own eportfolios.

Their collective efforts have been curated on a Wikiversity page.