On Diversity

Tēnā koutou katoa

Welcome
to you all

On day 1 of the 31-Day Comment Challenge I had my Carl Sagan’s baloney detector switched on. I was skeptical. I didn't want to participate. I didn’t think there was anything useful to be gained from it.

The devil's advocate

I even sent a comment to Michele Martin’s post saying that if anything was more likely to foster homophily (a topic of one of her posts) then the Comment Challenge was it. Some may have said that I was being negative. I didn’t think so. I thought I was being reflective and I had voiced my devil’s advocate opinion - on Michele’s blog. What’s more,
I was entitled to my opinion. Michele said so.

Broadens the mind

I took an active interest in debates when at school. I wasn’t great at English, but my teacher, Mr Butterfield, encouraged me to join the debating society. He was a great exponent of ‘the devil’s advocate’.
He said that whether you believed in the argument or not, it was good to participate by taking the opposite point of view. “Broadens the mind”, he would say. He taught me that there’s strength in diversity.

Every day of The Challenge confirms this. Just look at the variety of points of view one can find on one blog about whether comments should be sent to a post or somewhere else. Or the plethora of different ideas and opinion on what makes a good comment, let alone what makes a good post. And what do we get from all this? We learn - about things that we’d never heard of or thought of before. Diversity.

Mind bloggling

Have you ever counted the different looks that you see in blogs as you spend a while reading posts and writing a comment or two? It is mind bloggling the different colours and types of templates and formats you come across even from the same blog provider, never mind all the different blog site providers that are out there. That's sheer diversity.

I read a few posts recently written by people who had just started the Challenge. Here we are into week four and you read about what people, who have just started, are saying about the Challenge. Are they enthusiastic about what they see? Are they ever! For them, it’s a strength to have the opportunity to read about what others before them have or have not done. Did everybody do it the same way? Hmm? That’s diversity.

Is it okay to peek?

So the late starters are not short of opinion about how to do something. Sometimes I tend to work in a vacuum when given a task – often that method works but occasionally it wastes time while a wheel or two are invented. Some people look around to see what’s going on in other workshops. In one post I came across, Claire Thompson asked if it was cheating to look at what others did in writing a comment policy. Of course it's not cheating. If I'd done that I could have saved a lot of time! It's smart - it's benefiting from diversity.

Ka kite anō

Catch ya later