Being a good follower is hard. It requires commenting, something I have never quite gotten the hang of.
I am most definitely a lurker. I love to read blogs, but I rarely comment. Commenting requires me to be willing to engage in a conversation (this point is stressed in almost every post you read about the subject). It may seem odd that a person who enjoys blogging would be shy about commenting, but it is something that I have found to be rather common across the blogosphere.
For me, a blog is really just a place to record my thoughts. The idea that other people might be looking makes me think things through before I post them, to refine my thoughts until I decide that they are presentable. But all the thoughts are still mine. I know exactly what I am thinking when I post them. When I comment on someone else's blog, I have to not only know what I am talking about, but what someone else is talking about.
Figuring out what someone means when they are writing is difficult for me. The way I read a post is colored by my own experiences. I might think of a certain phrase with a different inflection than they intended, or the choice of words might be more or less charged from their point of view. Determining another person's emotions is sometimes difficult for me in a face-to-face conversation, even though I can read body language and facial expressions and listen for voice pitch and inflection in order to figure out what someone means. Take that away, and I am little more than clueless.
I don't want to be a Darth Commenter (I find this name for rude, angry commenters rather cute), but the only time I ever really want to comment is when I disagree with the blogger, usually quite strongly. On the discussion board for one of my classes this week, there were a lot of people who were commenting on a very controversial topic. Emotions tend to run high, and a few of the posts that were written left me wondering why people couldn't just agree to disagree. I was torn between a desire to join the "discussion" and the knowledge that posting a rant wasn't really going to help the situation.
Deciding which blogs to follow is usually rather difficult for me. I am incredibly finicky reader, blogs have to have the right mash of information and personality for me to be interested in reading them; blogs with no substance are pointless to read and blog with too much information tend to block out the personality of the person writing the post. Finding goods blogs written by my classmates, however, was easy. I decided to follow all the ones that I thought were interesting, instead of just stopping at five (and I will keep adding more as I go, but I haven't had a chance to,look at everyone's blog).
Here the list of EDUC 3040 blogs I decided to follow:
*Korina Biemesderfer's 23 Things*23 Things by LBarth*apsu23Stritzel*Armistead's Small Blog About 23 Big Things*Future History Teacher by JBrewer*Han Solo and CdeBaca*Jessica Daigle's 23 Things*M,Mitchell*School Blogs by bwood6*Shay's Stuff*
Finding outside blogs was a little more difficult. It seems that everytime I find a blog that I think is really interesting, it is too old or the posts are to infrequent. Here are the outside blogs that I decided to follow:
*SpeEd Change*Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs*
I do not comment much, because I feel like comments need to contain important information. Sometimes I don't have anything to add to the conversation. When I do comment, it is typically for two reasons: I have something to add or I feel like the blogger needs some form of encouragement. As the class progresses, I hope that I get more comfortable with commenting so that I can bring meaningful thoughts to further the online conversation.
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