Message in a Bottle....Why I'm Blogging

I'm doing one of the things that I love best: writing....and writing about learning / teaching. I'm also doing my homework: I started bloggin as one of the requirements for a 6-week online seminar I'm taking about teaching online and hybrid courses. I hope to keep the blog going beyond the seminar, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'll use this space to think aloud about the experiences of being a student and being a teacher in an online course....which is to say that I'm blogging about being a learner.

I've done this kind of reflection before, and I'm glad to have a nudge to do it again. A few years ago, I decided to journal for 5 minutes a day each time that I worked on an article that I was writing. I journaled straight through from the start through submitting the piece to an editor, and it was a telling snapshot of challenges and rollercoaster of emotions that a writer can face.

I kept the journal because....

• I wanted my students to read it--to get a sense that the challenges they faced as teacher-writers weren't unique. I wanted them to understand that their questions were the questions of good writers--and that they had what it would take to get through the challenges of their own writing. 
• I wanted to model some things for my students: to give them a window into how I thought about and dealt with those challenges, as well as to show them what I would be looking for in their own journals about writing. 
• I wanted to write to my future self. When students in my class were stumped, or frustrated, or surprised, or elated, I wanted to be there with them and understand their experience....and how I might be most helpful to them.

My hope is that by sharing some of my thinking here about learning/teaching, I'll help other learners (whether students or teachers) who are interested in the same kinds of experiences and questions that I'm working through. In a way, this blog will be a message in a bottle....and I expect that when I'm teaching online / hybrid courses of my own--or helping other professors through the online teaching adventure--that I'll come back to find these notes to help me anticipate and understand what they may be thinking, doing, feeling, and wondering.