Mathemagenic

If you want more of BlogWalk 1.0:

• posts of others should be linked from BlogWalk Topic Exchange channel 
• photos by Andy, Ton, Martin, Sebastian

I will be updating this post, so be patient :)

Quiet... For me BlogWalk 1.0 came to be a five days long event. It started from meeting Sebastian and Aaron on Wednesday, walking and talking in Utrecht about the power of weblogs for reflective learning, and ended today as Sebastian and Martin stayed over the weekend...

Face-to-face time feels great. You learn more about people, start to recognise their voices, connect with their personal stories that do not get to their weblogs... It feels rich and rewarding. Meeting amplifies conversations, mixing and moulding them better than any post could do, simply by bringing people in a same space. Even when you are not talking to everyone, walls with post-its aggregate ideas floating around. Finally you get something better then posts in your news aggregator, you get an overview that deepens your understanding of connections between ideas and takes you further...

I need more time for feelings, impressions and ideas to settle down, so just outlining two main themes I took from these days:

1. I guess I know better now what keeps me interested in weblogs enough to do PhD research - strong beliefs in empowering people. Weblogs just happen to be a good case to study it :)

2. If you ask my advice about implementing weblogs now I would say start from matching practices. Weblogs disrupt existing practices and this is an opportunity and a challenge at the same time: while introducing weblogs you do not just bring new tools, you change the way people do things. This makes implementation difficult, so I would rather start from finding cases where weblogs would not disrupt, but extend existing practice. For example, thinking of weblog use for reflective learning in corporate settings I would look opportunities to embed them into action learning and coaching programs.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk