What Do You Think Of It So Far?

Tēnā koutou katoa

Welcome to you all

make your own comic see your-day-in-a-comic

This month has been action packed for me. Restructuring at work at the beginning of May meant not only relocation and installation of new workplace facilities, desk etc, but also new strategies to do with regionalisation. As well, we got new email software and the toilet blocks were being refurbished (I’m not sure what was more inconvenient, the new email application or the lack of toilets!)

A month of analysis

It has been a month of analysis. I’ve constantly been analysing and reviewing my job at work. I applied for an e-lead teacher position last week – if I get it, I may not find much difference in what I do day to day but it will provide me with something different to think about and learn.

The Comment Challenge was different and actually helped me cope with all this disruption. But it too came with its fair share of analysis and reviews. In fact, it was analysis and review from day one. Here’s a list of the reviews about the Challenge that I wrote on my blog:

reflecting on what I've learnt so far
should we be commenting on blogs?
. . . and I have been found wanting
using comments to write a post, etc
not writing 5 comments in 5 minutes
analysing comments on my blog
reviewing and highlighting comments
how to write a great comment
frustrations of the challenge
on diversity

branding through comments
my commenting strategy
how may it change my teaching?
writing a comment writing guide
more on how it may change my teaching
my top five lessons in the challenge

Peripheral observation

As you can see there was no end of thinking going on. One or two things that I noticed, but didn’t write about, were the peripheral observation of things that amounted to collateral phenomena - things that didn’t really impact heavily on the tasks, aims and strategy of the project. Things like the weekly decline in activity on blogs in the blogosphere over the period Friday through to Monday.

For me in New Zealand, the lull was from Saturday through to Tuesday, due to time-zone differences. But it is significant that activity on the Challenge seemed to be directly related to the working week. I spent as much time on the project at the weekend as I did through the week, for this was when I could catch up on all the things I didn’t manage to get done Monday to Friday.

A knot of people

Then there was the knot of people in the blogosphere who were not too keen on the Challenge taking place at all. I became more aware of this group nearer to the end of the project, but had suspected their existence earlier. I guess being a skeptic about the Challenge myself made me more likely to be aware of the possibility that others may not see any point to the project. They may even have been against the principles that lay behind its reason for being.

My original skepticism was not over what the project could offer. It was more to do with Michele Martin’s recent post on how the Internet was making her stupid and reasons she gave for owning that opinion.

What next?

Sue Waters asked on Bonnie Kaplan's post what the next challenge was. I think it should be something around the lines of involving those online capable people who read blogs but never comment. For me it would be an interesting challenge to find out their opinion of what the blogs bring to their lives. After all, they are the silent majority. What a wealth of things we could learn if even half of them came to the party and joined the commenters.

Ka kite ano
Catch ya later