And, there’s really the rub: virtual communities have two qualities that make them require special attention: they are virtual and they are usually voluntary. Turn off Tweetdeck and Twitter essentially goes away. Forget to visit iGoogle and the blogging world is somewhat distant. They aren’t calling on the phone or bouncing in my launcher bar.

So, for me, the issue is one of just making time and the commitment to being more active in all these communities. Finding something to write about, posting articles of interest to Twitter, and reading and commenting on the Ning. Maybe over that first cup of coffee in the morning…harken back to reading the paper with breakfast?

And then I wonder, if I struggle to keep up my connections with the virtual world, what’s going to happen to may students when they leave the course? Will they have found enough in this virtual world to continue their work: how many of them will blog? or tweet? or be part of the Ning? What do they need to experience in the next two months that will convince at least some of them to continue to use these tools to teach and learn?

But now the work load has subsided a bit and I actually spent today reading and crocheting rather than working.  I got on my computer to check in to the online classes I’m teaching and to harvest a few crops in Farmville.  And, I had an urge to write, too. It’s funny…I was really worried about being able to find the time and energy to read once I finished my degree.  So many people had told me that they hadn’t been able to read for a long time after finishing their degrees.  And reading whatever I wanted was one of those things I kept promising myself that I was going to do when I was done.  So, I made an effort to read and even did some writing about my reading on my personal blog.

What I didn’t seem to be able to do is write professionally.  In fact, the last thing I wrote was a proposal for the American Educational Research Association conference.  I’m happy to say it was accepted.  I’ve been doing a lot of creating or what you might think of as 21st century writing: a website for a STEM project, the first in a video series called Math in Real Life and two episodes of a new podcast.  I’ve also been doing a lot of data work including Moodle administration, survey development, and a conference handout book.  And there’s been some flash programming for a kids’ website I’ve been working on with my husband. But, with the exception of some personal journaling and a few blog posts about books, I haven’t been writing, not even Twitter posts.  I should be working on an article about my study and I have passing thoughts about twitter posts and blog entries.  But I just can’t commit to the process.  (Just as an aside, this is my second stab at getting this blog post done.)

I’m not sure about the source of the block.  I do know that I find it difficult to write off the cuff they way I used to when I wrote blog entries.  They weren’t completely stream of conscious but I certainly didn’t draft them the way I did my dissertation.  The first three chapters of the study began as the proposal so they probably went through somewhere around 8 to 10 drafts and were written over the course of a year.  The last two chapters only went through two drafts and were written in about three months.  But that was three months of almost full time drafting, writing and revising.  It was intensive but also satisfying and productive.

But it seems to have ruined me for writing anything else. I want to edit every sentence, labor over every work, craft each paragraph.  I worry about having something important to say and whether I should be adding citations.  The freedom I used to feel as I wrote blog entries eludes me.

So, for tonight I’m going to stop and publish this…just get some words moving around.

But, yesterday, as I headed out to vote and then, later in the evening, as I waited for the election returns, I found I wanted to share with others besides just my husband and the dogs. And, happily, there was my online community.  Over the past year, I’ve made an effort to become a more active participant in that community, and last night, almost for the first time, I could really see that it at work, mostly through Twitter.  During the day, we exchanged voting stories, how long the lines were, how we felt about what we had done.  Many people posted pictures and videos.  Then, as the polls began to close, we gathered to share our anxieties, to celebrate the milestones, and, finally, to take a deep collective breath as we realize what had just happened in our country.

Looking back, I can’t point to a specific moment when I joined the community.  It’s been a gradual process, one that I suspect will continue.  One positive step I’m taking is to do more with this weblog by following along with Teach42’s 30 Days To Being a Better Blogger.  I’ve only gotten through the first challenge, to update my About page.  I was surprised to discover that it was woefully out of date, like from 2006.  My other plan is to do more reading and responding to others both as comments and as blog entries as a way of making connections.

Another step is going to do more with the Ning community I’ve chosen.  I’m a member of VSTEOnline.  This semester, I had my pre-service teachers sign up.  They’ve been doing a great job posting their ideas and questions and interacting both with each other and the other Ning members.  Sad to say, I haven’t done much except monitor their progress.  It’s time to make this community a priority.

It is easy to get distracted by multiple communities, something John Hendron recently wrote about, so I’m going to try to focus my energies.  I’ll still Twitter, of course, since I’m rapidly discovering how much I’ve come to rely on those little updates from my tweets, and just last night welcomed several more friends to my Twitter world.

Thanks to all of you who make up my learning network…some of you know who you are, others have no idea. (But I’ll be sending out a few thank you notes so you may find out soon.)  Together, we are living, learning, and growing together!

That was the theme of an article I wrote–”Don’t Feed the Trolls: Using Blogs to Teach Civil Discourse“–for Learning & Leading With Technology that appeared in the May 2008.  I’m in the process of getting permission to put the article on my website so for now you need to be an ISTE member to read it.  Why is this important to this story?  Because I, at least, had my head in the sand when it came to the rhetoric of hate that has been directed towards liberals.  Evidently, joking about killing liberals and issuing liberal hunting licenses is fair game for cable news commentators, radio entertainers, and conservative bloggers.  I wrote about this in my personal blog:

Really?  Someone, anyone, finds it funny to talk about killing people like me because of my political views.  I might find Russ Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly offensive but I would never wish their death.

And I found myself wondering how we got here…where hateful rhetoric like this is not only accepted but seemingly encouraged.  While I wouldn’t want to blame people like Sean Hannity for what happened last Sunday, his ongoing war against liberals certainly didn’t help.  For someone who is mentally unbalanced, these relenting attacks become an underlying soundtrack to a tragic life and offer up an easy target.  Tom Friedman says that while he was sleeping, the world got flat.  While I was sleeping, the world got ugly.

We can DO something about this, folks.  We can talk to kids about how words–whether spoken or written–really matter.  I’m sure there are liberals out there who are also guilty of negative rhetoric although my own bias might make it more difficult for me to really hear them.  As you head into the school year and start getting your kids on the web, please take the time to include civil discourse in your conversations with them.

The second example came along with my cheesemaking kit. The instructions recommending keeping a cheesemaking journal to make notes about the experience.

The third example came from Southern Living magazine. In their most recent edition, they recommend that, in order to learn more about gardening, you should keep a journal with notes and diagrams.

So, there seems to be lots of agreement that journaling is a good way to learn. And, as I suggest in my title, I have a tool for that: a weblog. Now, I can hear some of you saying, so what, Karen? Are you just now figuring this out? Certainly using a blog as a personal learning journal is not a new idea amongst people like me. But, it might be a new idea for teachers. And, for those of us who work with teachers, the new idea might be how we approach them with this tool. Instead of starting with the tool, start with the instructional practice of having students reflect on their learning through writing. I think there are a fair number of teachers across the content areas who already do this. So, building on a practice they have already established, talk to them about the affordances of blogging technology to facilitate that learning.

We also owe it to them to help them figure out how they will implement this enhanced strategy using the computer resources available to them. When I was teaching language arts, my students kept reading journals. If I were doing it today, I would certainly want to use weblogs because their affordances greatly outweigh the paper/pencil journals in terms of commenting and building a community of readers. However, I would need to have pretty decent access to computers so students could write in their journals when they had something to say rather than when I got the computer lab scheduled. If getting access to computer technology made that impossible, I would probably go back to the paper/pencil journals, whose one major affordance is that they can be easily carried to class or kept in a box in the classroom. Schools continue to struggle with the access issue so it must be part of the conversation we have with teachers.

Just FYI: I am keeping my cheese journal online as part of my personal weblog in the hopes that my experiences might be useful for others who have begun to the journey to cheesemaker.

I had not posted for awhile but now that the proposal process is heating up, I wanted to record some thoughts and questions.  When I logged in, my LJ homepage informed me that I “only” have one friend.  And then helpfully provided a link to organizations where I presumably could find friends.  It was like having your mother appear at the door of room, urging you to get out and meet some people, maybe join a club or something.

But, I have LOTS of friends, I wanted to say to LJ.  And, if I don’t, it’s because I’m happy with it that way.  I don’t want to discuss model rockets or the best recipes for meatloaf…at least not here.  I actually do that other places but LJ is where I just want to tuck myself in the corner, shielding my paper from others’ views and write.  In an increasingly public world, we may need to carve out space for private thoughts in the network.  That’s what I’ve done in LJ; I just didn’t expect to be judged wanting because of that desire for privacy.

I think I heard about the death of Heath Ledger on the news last evening.  Now, this evening, Larry King is covering it on CNN, and the correspondents keep condemning the blogs for spreading bad information.  After hearing it for about the fourth time, I decided to go see what the blogs were saying.

What I discovered was an article in the Huffington Post about how websites really broke this story.  Here’s the one that’s claiming to have broken the story.  So, I guess that’s what they mainstream folks are really steamed about.  The blogs beat them to it.

My other excuse is that I’ve been getting my church up and running with Web 2.0.  I set up the blog for them and have been trying to add audio and video in anticipation of this week’s unveiling.

Now, I’m sitting at the last keynote for Ed-Media 2007.  I spent yesterday at the conference.  There’s lots of energy among these mostly higher education folks.  But I’m struck by the fact that, in terms of technology, they are in exactly the same boat as K-12.  They get that the technology is out there, that our students are living in the world, but they haven’t figured out how to use it any better than the folks in the elementary and secondary classrooms.  I attended several presentations that discussed how to build a better portal or course management system to serve the needs of teachers and students.  I also chose two of the invited speakers.  John Cook discussed his work in the UK with Reusable Learning Objects.  And Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris described their work with handhelds.   But the only problem is that these are still pretty tech-centered.  There weren’t any compelling reasons for a non-techie teacher to adopt the technologies.

From InfoWorld, an article describing the French government’s attempt to reign in citizen journalists by making it an offense for anyone to film and distribute acts of violence unless they are sanctioned journalists. So, they are trying to unblur the very blurry lines between bloggers and journalists. I think along with that law, they should prohibit these sanctioned journalists from blogging. It might be too confusing for their citizens to distinguish between the real and the possibly not-real. That’s assuming, of course, that the journalists are always reporting what’s real.