Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

The task for the day is to Take a Break. I saw this before today and decided to set something up in advance to take the day off (which is nice because it’s in the middle of a three day weekend).

This image of sitting on top of a mountain is perfect for my Take a Break day.

Day 25 Activity – Taking a Break

The task for Day 25 was to take a day of total rest. No pressure to comment. No reason to do anything on your computer at all if you don’t want to. Just relax. But perhaps most of all the comforting reminder that “We’ll be here when you get back.”

Reflections and Revelations

On Day 16, I opted to take A Day to Breathe & Catch Up. Taking a day to just do something fun, like finding an incredible mountain view to post was a great break.

Image Source: Muris Kuloglija Kula Asja. Sarajevo under fog. Royalty Free Use.

This blog post is part of The Comment Challenge, comment08.

It took me a bit of reflecting to figure out why this challenge–posting a message in a foreign language–was more challenging for me than most and why I ended up modifying the challenge.

Many of the people in my family of origin speak Finnish as a first language (my mother, aunt, uncles and many cousins), so when I was learning foreign languages in school, I always wanted to make sure that when I spoke or wrote the language, it was perfect.

Even with using Google Translator, which would assist in reading a foreign language blog post as well as translating comments into the proper language, I still felt extremely uncomfortable about posting in a foreign language. When I played with the Google Translator and ended up with responses written in languages using different characters, I was even less sure about posting the characters.

I then decided that if I am going to be commenting on a blog post (which I haven’t be doing a lot of), it would be better to post on a blog from someone in the challenge, so I morphed the activity to being one where I would post a comment on a blog from one of the 31 Day Challenge Participants that was being written in a foreign country.

Chosen Blogs & Comments

• Brian Lockwood, How? What? Questions for Lifelong Learning, blogging from Yokohama, Japan. A comment was left on the April 21st post Are Web 2.0 sites Electronic Portfolios friendly?
• Leigh Newton, Leigh in Azerbaijan Looking at the Country and Education, blogging from Baku, Azerbaijan. A comment was left on his May 14th post on Artistic Shoes
• Adrienne Michetti, create. connect. question, blogging from Hanoi, Vietnam. A comment was left on her May 11th post on I believe in global education, BUT…
• Sarah Stewart, Sarah’s Musings blogging from Dunedin, New Zealand. A comment was left on her May 24th post on Comment Challenge Day 17: Commenting on Five blogs in Five minutes. (O.K. this last one wasn’t strictly a foreign language, but Sarah had visited my blog a few days ago and I decide to stop by hers.

The simple sentence that I decide to have translated was: “Greetings from the 31 Day Comment Challenge.”

• In Japanese 日からのご挨拶コメントの挑戦です。
• In Azerbaijani wasn’t an option. Had to go with Russian, Поздравления с Днем 31 Комментировать обстоятельства.
• In Vietnamese. (I used http://vdict.com to translate the Vietnamese into English) Những lời chào từ 31 Thách thức Bình luận Ngày
• In New Zealand. (I picked Maori from the page “Hello in Many Languages“) Tena koe from the 31 Day Challenge.

After seeing the translations in foreign alphabets, I decided to keep the translations just for this post, since I didn’t know if posting text in a foreign alphabet would just end up a garbled HTML mess. So I posted a simple “Hi” in the language of the blog and the fact that I was posting from the 31 Day Challenge.

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The activity for the Challenge today was to figure out how to be a fabulous blog commenter and take that one step further.

The next part of the challenge was to determine what tips would you give someone if you were teaching them to be a great blog commenter.

I had some ideas of my own, but decided to went in search of other thoughts from other bloggers before synthesizing my own.

Gina Trapani offered these guidelines about posting weblog comments:

Stay on topic.
Contribute new information to the discussion.
Don’t comment for the sake of commenting.
Know when to comment and when to e-mail.
Remember that nobody likes a know-it-all.
Make the tone of your message clear.
Own your comment.
Be succinct.
Cite your sources with links or inline quoting.
Be courteous.
Don’t post when you’re angry, upset, drunk or emotional.
Do not feed or tease the trolls.

Good Comment had the following list of questions that one should ask oneself prior to posting a blog comment.

Is my comment on topic?
Is my comment as short and concise as possible?
Is my comment friendly and polite in tone and language?
Does my comment add something useful to the conversation?
Would I want somebody to leave this comment on my blog?
Does your comment pass the test?

According to Good Comment, if you can answer positively to each of the above questions, then the chances it’s a good comment.

Blog Comments are Permanent and for Building Relationships

A recent post on DoshDosh by Maki reminds us that we should view every blog comment as a permanent, long-term representation of yourself and your brand. We should also be seeing blog comments as a way of networking with the blog author.

Think long-term: not just incoming traffic today but exposure down the road. Don’t just focus on getting an immediate return (visitors via your link drop) but use comments to develop relationships of ongoing value.

Maki stresses to “Think long-term, think relationships and think about getting repeat benefits” and that Commenting is an extraordinary easy way to not only get visitors to your site, but develop mutually beneficial relationships along the way.

My Six “C’s” on Being a Great Blog Commenter

The key tips I would pass on to someone about being a great blog commenter are:

• Centered – Stay focused.
• Contribute – Share some information or something useful.
• Courteous- Be Polite.
• Credit – Give credit where credit is due. (Cite your sources.)
• Camaraderie – Commenting is a way of building relationships with other bloggers.
• Constant – Remember comments are permanent.

The last one, My Golden Rule of Internet Blog Posting, comes from my thoughts on an earlier blog posting, Debating / Day 5 Comment on a Blog Post You Don’t Agree With, where Bill Scott responded in the 10 Rules for Blog Debates with

Remember that once your post is submitted it will be read by many and possibly used against you later. Always examine your motives before you post.

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Today’s task is to look for favorite comments left in the Rumination’s blog and then highlight why I LIKED the comment. I pulled quotes from several areas: clarifying, tips, corroborative & community building.

Favorite Comment Clarifying Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

Michele’s comment helped me to clarify the differences between Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0.

Michele Martin| The Bamboo Project Blog

I think that the biggest difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that it’s about creating community. That means people coalescing around shared interests and “talking” about those interests through blogging and commenting (including comments on things like Flickr photos and YouTube videos). Think of it as a party where some people will just sort of watch on the sidelines, taking it all in, never saying a word. Others will want to interject now and then with comments. Still others will be all over the place, interacting in a variety of ways. But all people have the option to participate when and if they want to.

It’s really very powerful, although I’ve found that people are so used to being one-way passive recipients of information (i.e., the TV model of interacting with technology), many are having difficulty making the switch to being empowered to take online action. But when everyone gets it, that will be the REAL revolution!

Favorite Tip Comments

Betty left me a great tip for using Google Docs with students. Sue passed on a good resource for me to review about Diigo.

bgilgoff | Betty Online

…another way of having students collaborate is with google docs. It also tracks history of participation but is more similar to a word document and less public than a wiki. I use it sometimes with my colleagues and have used it with grade 4/5 students. The most effective use though that I’ve seen is the way that my son uses it with other students in some of his university classes.

Sue Waters | Mobile Technology in TAFE

Most of the educators are really liking diigo. Check out Liz Davis’s screencast on Diigo — it may help you.

Favorite Corroborative Comment

Christine’s comment help me to realize that I wasn’t the only one who felt frustrated when working on online collaborative efforts.

Christine Martell | VisualsSpeak Blog

I would have loved doing my collaborative work in grad school on a wiki. It was very annoying to be the one who carried others to good grades!

Favorite Community Building Comment

Christine was one of the recipients of the creating community with other commenters award. This was her response to being an award winner.

Christine Martell | VisualsSpeak Blog

Thanks Kristi. Community is very important to me, and I actively facilitate it in the offline parts of my life, but I never felt I did it very well online. So I particularly appreciate the encouragement, and hope I can learn to do even a small part of what Sue and Michele do.

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I made the realization yesterday that while the 31 Day Comment Challenge has been a great learning experience, it has also been a bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be and realizing that I am devoting way more than 10 minutes to research and write a blog post.

I got to thinking about what leads to blogging overload, blog fatigue and blogging burnout and was wondering where I might be on the spectrum.

Blogging<——>Blog Overload<——>Blog Fatigue<——>Blog Burnout——> Blog RIP

These were some of the best definitions that I could come up with for these terms:

Blog Overload -When the blogger gets overloaded either by 1.) daily posts to his or her own blog or 2.) keeping up with reading and responding to blogs.

Blog Fatigue – When blogging becomes a challenge and the blogger gets tired of daily blogging and decides to take a break.

Blog Burnout – When blogging becomes too much of a chore or becomes a burden and the blogger decides to stop blogging altogether.

Five Stages of Blogging According to Kent Newsome and Jason Kaneshiro, The Five Stages of Blogging:

1. Excitement: While setting up a new blog, the blogger is full of great ideas, is inspired, and expectations are high.
2. Expectation: When starting from zero, little things mean a lot and progress seems exponential.
3. Frustration: Blogging meet diminishing returns, turns into inefficient work, and the blogger finds it harder and harder to get attention amid the multitude of other blogs.
4. Alienation: Rejection of the blogosphere.
5. Abandonment: A dead blog.

Paul Kedrosky offered the following insights as to why blog fatigue happens:

There are likely as many reasons as there are bloggers, but chief among them is the insidious way that blogging goes from a diversion to an obligation.

Consider: Many people start blogging because they think it’s a useful replacement for sending things around on mailing lists to friends.

The trouble is, most of the people reading such blogs are not friends, so bloggers start worrying that these people won’t understand when they take a few days (or weeks) off from sending things around.

Paul Kedrosky offered the following insights as to whether blog fatigue will ever go away:

Probably not. The economics of blogging (for most bloggers) will never be such that they can count on a large stream of income flowing in as a result of their musings. Those people are always going to be at risk for blog fatigue, if mostly because they inevitably wonder just what the heck they are doing this for.

They will either decide to

1.) Blog on their own schedule, not that of some imagined reader, or 2. ) Become “blog wood” — one of the myriad abandoned blogs floating around in the blogosphere’s many currents.

Preventing Blogging Burnout

Ideally I’d like to keep myself from getting Blogging Burnout, becoming one of the many abandoned blogs and ending up as ‘blog wood” or a Blog RIP (Rest in Peace) on the Blog Reaper. (The Blog Reaper publishes a blog of obituaries on dead blogs.)

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