Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 32 seconds
Do you ever end a f2f or synchronous conversation (extreme example: thesis defense) and think, “hey wait, can we go back and continue that point about…”? This happens to me ALL THE TIME.
Often, I would call the person back or email them or whatever, but sometimes I’d let it drop.
But ever since I started blogging, I sort of feel compelled to blog the rest of my thoughts. Both as a way of capturing the thoughts, taking them further, but also blogging helps me take the thought beyond the specific context it was in, and into a way that might be useful or interesting for other people to read and possibly even respond to.
And that’s why sometimes I blog 3 times a day: I’ll have had 3 interesting conversations, with the afterthoughts living in my head, and I won’t feel comfortable til I have blogged them.
Right now, I have a million writing things in my head, some commissioned pieces, some blog pieces… Which leaves little time for the blogposts… But here are some things I want to write about soon on this blog…
A. Faculty development, and my emergent identity as one, now doing my PhD and participating in social media so heavily has changed this (dedicated to Bonnie Stewart and Howard Rheingold)
B. Egypt, and conspiracy theories on the electricity cuts
C. How I developed my syllabus for the “designing educational games” module (mainly because I want feedback from my twitter game co-designers)
And then again today, i spent half an hour at the #digped discussion which ended up with a DM with Sean about my upcoming piece there, with an invitation to write a new article on something I wanted to expand upon in the twitter chat but where 140 chars had not been enough
And then right after that, I was in a Skype call with Howard Rheingold and as soon as it was over, I felt like, “No, wait, maybe I should expand on such and such point more” or “maybe I should have said this” or “why the heck did I say that?”
And the point of this post is not really in the details… The point is that I think I have become sooo much of a blogger that it’s affecting how I feel about when I talk. I am pretty spontaneous as a blogger, too, but I do think about what I wanna blog about sometimes for hours. It’s gotten to a point where I can’t stop thinking of how to blog the rest of the stuff I didn’t say out loud or in that twitter chat… And its gotten that writing is now essential to my thinking… Like as if not writing something feels like I haven’t thought it, and gosh, that’s bad. But maybe it’s related to being a mom with a career in full swing and needing something to be my “earth” and my that’s what my blog as become for me. It’s my “resting place”. Wow, blog as “home” or “resting place”. Yeah, that’s what it is.
@Bali_Maha You know it’s a community when you find yourself thinking of things to share with it!
Your post reminds me of my ‘muse’. It isn’t that I blog my thoughts so that I can finish them, it is more that my ‘muse’ is like a compulsion. I cannot not blog. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I waited two whole days before I setup my first blog – it was pure torture. My ‘muse’ was in overdrive – I had so many thoughts that needed to be written – and I felt that by waiting, some of those thoughts got lost. The timing of the ideas mattered – and by waiting, some of the ideas didn’t hold the same power as they would have had I started blogging immediately.
I get asked about blogging … at first it is something that you need to really think about … but if you are really a blogger at heart, then eventually your muse speaks to you … then you cannot help but blog. It is no longer an option … blogging becomes a way of life, or as you say it, a way of thinking!
Yes yes yes to all of that, and I can sense it in your blogging style, too, that compulsion, it is “no longer an option”. In many ways what ur doing w ur BC Blog is generous and useful and inspiring, but it seems like u cannot not do it. I think back on the toughest times of my life, and realize that i would have blogged them if i could. Instead, i wrote for myself or wrote emails to a close friend. BLOGGING IS SO MUCH BETTER