Barbara Ganley on Blogging and Time

When I first became interested in blogging, I realized how time intensive it could be. I asked Gardner, quite seriously, “How do you find the time?” He replied in typical Gardner fashion, “How can you not find the time?” Okay, at the time, I figured that was just one more of Gardner’s ironic responses along the lines of, if you think it’s important, you’ll find the time. But, I realized today that I get it. Blogging, to me, has become alot like breathing. It’s just something you do to live, or at least to live more fully.

The catalyst for my epiphany was a blog posting by Barbara Ganley on Blogging and Time. I’ve been thinking alot lately about what University 2.0 will look like (blog posting coming soon, I promise, I just need to think it through a bit more). Yesterday, I blogged about the changes in work processes that social software enables, and I don’t know that I made myself clear. What I said was:

It seems so natural to process committee work as it gets posted (i.e. as members do the work and make it available on-line), rather than waiting until right before the meeting to read it all and hopefully have time to reflect on it.

I sort of knew what I meant, but in retrospect, I doubt if most readers did.

A quotation from Barbara’s post was another way of phrasing the same idea:

[O]ne of the appeals of social software for me is that it allows me to feel as though I am talking and writing through and around and in time and space rather than in discrete, finite boxes stapled together.

I get this.

Returning to the issue of having time for blogging, she reflects:

[T]hrough multimedia blogging’s connectivity, not only can I link my writing to the thoughts and ideas of people I read online, I can link back to my own earlier thoughts or beginnings of ideas through the archives and internal search mechanisms–I am linked to my process and progress, and to my homelife as it intersects with my work. And each time I do, the story becomes denser and more interesting to me. So questions about time–how much time this Web work takes–are difficult to answer and seem , well, pretty beside the point these days. I blog when I have something I am working out; teaching with blogs takes as much time as teaching with anything else. And taking the time to play around with Frappr for my world bloggers and learn how to skypecast a la Will and how or if I can use it in the classroom is part of what I do as a dedicated teacher–I stay up with my field–teaching. And of course good teaching takes a lot of time. Reflective practices take a lot of time. Nurturing communities takes a lot of time. So I’m okay with the time it takes.

Exactly.