linarmstrong’s posterous

This piece is worth a look .

In Savage Minds, Rex produces an excellent post, entitled as C. Wright Mills on blogging, in which he applies one of the older  texts (On Intellectual Craftmanship) to blogging: He had changed none of Mills’s original language except for replaced ‘journal’ and ‘file’ with ‘website’ and ‘blog’.

“......that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives......... You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organise their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is that, in the course of a lifetime, the modern individual has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet to be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature worker. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence."

I am keen to watch how as an insider researcher I separate /stand back to examine effects of the use of a blog  to develop learner's own  powers of expression. To maintain a blog is to engage in a controlled experience according to this piece and to craft thinking ,reflective practice and a way of writing that is personal to yourself. 

In my study I worked in a connective way by asking all years of a degree course  to blog. The idea being the examination of what they externalise and how they feel about it would be an original piece that adds to our understanding of technology tools for thinking and education. The results so far show Blogging as a personal development tool is excellent for some to help emotionally and educationally. Problems do develop for some bloggers such as the vulnerability of exposing knowledge and the use or over lap public and personal space. To complete a part of my literature review I focused on a search for blogging and women or returning learners /retrainers and education . This was very limited so I would like to point out that although this literature speaks of journalism, it may help to develop my arguments.