April already and 2011 has revealed itself to be a significant learning year. After completing the Blogging Challenge, I found myself voraciously feeding on the posts of other educators – sourcing links from yammer and twitter and other collaborative threads and then visiting and reading and leaving comments. The feedback from one of the participants in the Blogging Challenge who wrote about leaving 5 comments on other people’s blogs for every 1 post on your own has been a revelation to me! It has opened conversations with educators and students all over the world and it is wonderful to give feedback and encouragement to bloggers – especially student bloggers.

What this has meant for my own professional blog is neglect. However, it has been a time of learning and processing – lots of brain exercise which fits nicely into my reading and researching into the area of neuroplasticity and neural pathway building. Hopefully this area of interest will expand now with some newly made connections in the field of Special Education.

The other types of blogs that provide a huge source of learning are those of classroom teachers and technology integration specialists. Since my introduction to Yammer and the access-all-areas pass that it provides to teachers in NSW DET (or now DEC) of all shapes and sizes, and being able to ask questions and get answers that provide hints and additional expertise – well, the learning curve has steepened again!

Hopefully all this will translate into some quality reflection and synthesis, and can be articulated into some more writing soon… the benefits are all too obvious – the need for clarity on a range of issues is creating too much of a burden. Trouble is that I find myself once again revisiting the decision to blog – to make public my learning journey – to allow strangers into my thinking space… although this blog has been neglected, I have continued to write privately and struggle with the implications of publishing… more issues to deliberate on…