Of birds and blogs

That is a picture of the nest outside my window at home. I have become a bit obssessed with the bird family, watching the momma bird spread her wings to keep the rain off the eggs and snuggling down on them when it gets cold. But she abandons her job at the slightest movement, which is why I have such a good shot of those gorgeous blue eggs. Eggs don’t hatch without that warming, so I try not to disturb her too often.

I’m in Chicago right now at a conference for librarians. Olivia nd I are talking about a project we did with my students in which they had to use research blogs. (See our presentation wiki.) It seems to me that the old style “research logs” were somewhat helpful for students, but there wasn’t much opportunity for feedback. When they did get feedback, it was way past the time when the questions and doubts were happening. In a way, student researchers were on their own, incubating their thoughts on their own as best they could.

It seems so clear to me that blogs are the perfect solution. With Olivia and I monitoring their writing in their blogs, we got to jump in close to the time that students needed some advice or support. Sometimes it was enough just to tell them that what they thought was “failure” in their search was really just part of the messy process of research. Students also read each others’ blogs. We had this whole community of support! Those of us who blog know how great that kind of community can be. But I do think it is a little different from the blogging that I do; the students put their links out there along with their doubts, confusion and half formed thoughts. I used to do more “processing” like that in my blog (this the blog name) but I notice that I am not taking as many risks as I used to. Do we get self-conscious, wanting to write only well-formed ideas? The problem with that is that a great opportunity is lost: if I am not exposing my doubts and half formed ideas, I lose the chance to have others help, inspire, spark…

I dunno…just thinking out loud here…