An intuition that using weblogs might be a way to publish student writing lead me to occupy Borderland so I could try blogging myself. It started out as an encampment rather than a full-force occupation. I’d never heard of “edublogs,” and I didn’t have a well-defined blogging mission. I was simply writing about this and that, and pushing it out onto the web. Nothing happened. I couldn’t tell if anyone was reading the blog. There was no conversation. Blogging initially served simply as a technology for publishing texts and images.

astronaut self portrait
Astronaut Steve Robinson turns the camera on himself.

Consciousness and Self-Consciousness
I took a class and learned about social software. The blogger-author became a blogger-reader as I became more familiar with the form. But still there weren’t many comments. I set up some blogs for my students on a district server, and wrote about that. Will Richardson noticed, and I discovered the edubloggers’ network. Bud Hunt added Borderland to his sidebar. I became interested in the distributed conversation, yet didn’t know how to join it.

Blogging began getting complicated when the social dimension became apparent. Cognitive load increased as the blogger-author grew self-conscious. I wondered what I could write that teacher-bloggers would want to read. The blogger-editor appeared. ‘Aboutness‘ became an issue, and I began to see the blog in extrinsic terms. Questions like, Who am I to them? and Who are they to me? started to crop up. It wasn’t exactly fun, and I had to wonder why I exposed myself to such internal conflict, but I wasn’t ready to quit blogging because I sensed that I was missing some crucial technosocial understanding. I read Stephen Downes’ excellent article, How to be Heard, and made some adjustments.

Looking into Dark Places
From reading various blogs I learned that blog monitoring tools could show me if anyone was visiting Borderland. I got set up with Feedburner and was amazed to learn that I had 16 subscribers. I found out about Statcounter and my eyes were opened to the power of Google to refer people to my archives. People were reading Borderland even though they didn’t comment.

Complications compounded when self-consciousness itself became a matter of interest to me. The blogger-critic moved in and began to interfere with all of the other blogger-selves who are legitimately responsible for publishing Borderland. The blogger-critic is a merciless heckler, an interloper. He interferes with both the editor and the author, causing much cognitive conflict. He doesn’t monitor the blog; he monitors the blogger. His middle name is Doubt. Teachers of ZEN have spoken about the value of Doubt, and my current challenge is to make peace with this troublesome insurrectionist.

The blogger-critic feeds on tension between the human desire for affiliation and the creative need to Tell the TRUTH. He’s the popularity monitor, concerned with recognition. He insists on perfection and never says what it is. “How DO you look?” he taunts and jeers. He rattles my integrity, as I noted in a comment on Graham’s post about hypocrisy.

The blogger-self has become very complex and uncoordinated. There’s an author, but there’s also a reader, an editor, a critic, and ultimately an Observer of the entire schizophrenic racket. My desire to write about socially constructed literacies remains my main blogging mission, but I’m distracted by an internal dialog about the process itself, involved with annoying concerns for how my writing is received. And there are concerns about the concerns….Metablognition is the word I coined for this hall-of-mirrors, blog-and-blogger-monitoring tangle.

Whys and Wherefores
I blog this to document my experience of finding my way into a technosocial network, and to bear witness to challenges that blogging offers which have not been widely acknowledged. My experience may or may not be representative of anyone else’s, but it can nonetheless serve as a point of reference in the field of possibilities. I suggest that while blogging can be reflectively engaging and enriching, it can also be problematic for some people. With care, I think this form of sociality may open doors to the Self that students have not previously been lead through.

Blogging may build competence in a discourse that encourages extrinsic knowledge production, but it can also lead to self-consciousness that teachers should be aware of. This isn’t necessarily a negative outcome, and could be viewed as a learning opportunity if managed thoughtfully by a teacher who understands the condition.

Personally, my faith that maintaining the discipline will lead to new understandings that will ultimately prove beneficial is what keeps me engaged. Obstacles can be used as occasions for growth if they cause us to look inward and make necessary changes.