Friday, January 9, 2009

Is Lurking a Bad Thing?






I have been checking my Twitter account and always find the stuff that Will Richardson puts up to be fascinating. today, he talks about "Why Blogging is Hard" and I think he hits the nose on the head. it is about risk, risking failure or disagreement, or not being good enough. I have a hard time keeping up with blogging because i am not always sure I have something worth saying. i started out using the blog more as a journal, and have made it a personal mission to try to stick with it. I am just not certain that I have anything interesting to say.

I have listened to a learned from a lot of people in the last year. THEY are experts; I am not. I seem to lurk on twitter and lurk at webinars. Ironic that my interest in Web 2.0 has been primarily 1.0 on my part. So, I need to share, I guess. Build up confidence.

Maybe that is how a lot of our students feel too. As new learners, it has a far greater social consequence for them in their world. It is all about how they want to be perceived, which is often far from what they really are.

So, if nothing else, I am learning not just tech, but about taking risks and being willing to "put it out there." The other great lesson is about empathy, especially with my students, who feel this same way about new content, processing, and presenting.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons

1 comment:

Will Richardson said...

Thanks for reading, Nancy. Glad some of my ideas resonate. Nothing at all wrong with lurking, but at some point the collective "we" would be well served by your thinking and reflections, just as I am here. We all have to create and share, I think, if we want to truly find community around ideas.

Best,

Will