me + blog = ?

This is my first foray into blog-land, and I must admit to feeling more than a bit self-conscious. I am not new to distance learning, this being my eighth LIS graduate course online. The distance learning experience has been much more intense than I imagined it would be. I've been amazed at the depth into which we can delve into topics, the emotions that can surface as people passionately debate, and the level of sharing that can occur - sometimes moreso than in a face-to-face class.

I am, however, a muller and a polisher, which perhaps lends itself more to message threads, where one can - and I do - revise endlessly before "publishing". My sense is that blogging is more off-the-cuff, perhaps more like a casual discussion than a carefully worded comment. I'm just not used to the idea of my conversations appear online, for anyone else to read! Perhaps I will become more comfortable with the concept as the weeks go by.

It's not that I'm not a reflective practitioner, as they say. Perhaps I reflect too much! Regardless, I wonder why anyone would want to read my ramblings, or would have the time to do so. I guess I fall into the category of those who would prefer to ignore blogs, as Will Richardson says, in our textbook, because of the difficulty in assessing the reliability of the information therein (even at the risk of missing some important ideas).

However, information literacy education is near and dear to my heart, one of the primary reasons I want to work in a school library. It has become abundantly clear to me in reading Richardson that the world our students do - and will - live in is markedly different from the one I grew up in, which means they will need to become expert at dealing with Too Much Information. So I can't really keep my head in the sand about blogs any longer. As Richardson says, "there is no better way to understand the impact of the Read/Write Web than by becoming a part of it." (p. 40)