Blogging 101
As I was wrapping up my final blog post over the weekend my nearly three year old looked at me and said, “mom, stop saying “blogging,” that doesn’t mean anything.” And, in all honesty when the semester began and I heard that a large portion of our time would be dedicated to blogging - I have to admit I agreed with her assessment. A part of me felt like people who blogged had some sort of need for cyber-attention. Another part of me felt like I had nothing to offer in so public a venue. So, needless to say I was not excited about the prospect of blogging for an entire semester. I am happy to say that over the course of the semester I found myself warming up to the experience. I enjoyed reading my classmates blogs and their subsequent comments and I found that I enjoyed posting my own.
So, what does blogging mean? For me it has meant being part of the conversation. There are so few opportunities in my daily work to have a voice that within the larger discourse of higher education. I appreciated being challenged to frame my own thinking about current issues in higher education and to put that thinking out there for others to consider. I also appreciated the opportunity to consider, from others’ perspectives, their thinking about current issues in higher education. I spend a lot of time at work advocating for greater and deeper dialogue about the issues that matter to our work – this semesters exercise in blogging was an excellent, albeit, challenging opportunity for me to engage in that dialogue outside of my cozy community college. I’ve ordered my top blogs with #4 being my top blog.
1.) Women in Higher Education: A Personal Reflection
I began the semester with a relatively safe blog about women in higher education and took the opportunity to tie that to a personal experience I had recently had. In the end I was happy with the way it turned out – but as I said it was on the safe side for me. While on the safe side the post did garner 9 responses and a lot of diverse perspective.
2.) STEM: Leading the Way – The Only Way?
I had fun with this blog. The idea started after a conversation where my dad actually pointed out the piece in the Denver Post written by Colorado College president, Jill Tiefenthaler. For me, the purpose of the post was that we are creating a lot of either/or scenarios right now rather than finding room for the more people to participate – and that means STEM and the liberal arts can co-exist!
3.) On the brink: Helping students complete college
This particular blog allowed me to grapple with a very real issue in student affairs - the extent to which our role should or is changing as we see more and more students whose life circumstances are getting in the way of their ability to finish college. For me this blog also struck a personal cord. Having just finished my first year working in a community college I see students “on the brink” every day and yet the state and national pressure is to help ALL students complete.
4.) Farming in higher education: What’s corn got to do with it?
This blog was by far the most fun for me. I enjoyed the challenge of linking two seemingly disparate topics. I posted the blog with the “For Profit” blogs and was happy that I was able to draw the connection!
Reflection on the Blogging Experience
As I stated the blogging experience took me some time to warm up to. I wasn’t sure what I kind of contribution I wanted to make and if I’d be able to do it. In the end all of the blogs I posted meant something to me in terms of my reasons for working in higher education as well as for my personal and educational values.
I suppose that I could have challenged myself to post about something I was more unfamiliar with, yet, what I know about myself is that I know what excites me in higher education. So, where I chose to challenge myself was in commenting on topics that were new or uncomfortable for me. Perhaps one of my biggest stretches was to spend time in the “Athletics” blog. I did even find some posts that I commented on!
I did find ways to challenge myself through my own posts as well. For many of my posts I spent a great deal of time searching a number of sources (most of my posts did not rely on articles from the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed) and trying to be creative about where I could make connections. This for me was perhaps where I enjoyed blogging the most. There is so much out there that at first blush may seem unrelated to our work in higher education that in fact has a big impact on our work.
As the semester went on I also felt myself getting more comfortable “taking a stand.” This is a challenge for me because I do really enjoy to hear arguments from multiple perspectives and to make arguments from multiple perspectives. This for me was perhaps my greatest learning of the semester – being an advocate for my position while being open to other positions. I believe that I do the second part well – I don’t always advocate well for my position.
I also really enjoyed reading the array of blog posts by my classmates. This experience was a really creative way to have us look at the many current issues in higher education. While many of the topics never came up in class – simply due to limited time – it was a great way ensure a diversity of issues could be discussed.
Overall Course Reflections
Having been out of school for nearly 10 years I was definitely nervous about this semester. I’ve already had my fair share of melt-downs related to balancing it all – school, work, parenting, health, maintaining a relationship with my partner and finding time for myself. This class was a great way for me to get back into the proverbial “groove.”
I’m interested in and try to keep up on current issues in higher education as a matter of professional practice. This class provided an avenue to delve deeper. The course readings were relevant and thought provoking. I particularly enjoyed the readings that provided some historical context related to higher education and student affairs. The big take away from this class, for me, was that nothing is as simple as it seems – these issues are complex. The format of the class really highlighted just how complex these issues were. The opportunity to dig deeply into these topics in small groups was really valuable.
The Denver section had a number of professionals who had been working in higher education for ten-plus years and their experience was really invaluable – I learned a lot from my colleagues. I also appreciated the intentional focus on how different types of institutions of higher education deal with some of these issues as we had professionals in class who represented a variety of institutions. I think this is an important point to consider when we are talking about current issues in higher education.
I referred to this concept earlier – advocacy versus inquiry – and felt like the in-class format also supported our skill building in this area. As it relates to current issues it is important to both be able to effectively advocate for a position while also inquiring about diverse perspectives. Overall I felt like the class was set up well to allow us to practice this. A personal appreciation I had for the class were the intentional efforts by Matt to challenge us on our own use of language – particularly when our statements bordered on assumptions or were exclusionary.
Overall I took a lot away from this particular class more so around the skills I sharpened and reminder about complexity in our field. The content learning for me came from the readings. Again the historical perspectives were particularly interesting and helped to frame the idea that “current” issues have often been issues we have grappled with in our history. This point is valuable for me in being able to more holistically consider the issues facing higher education. One of the concepts related to this that has stuck with me is the idea of a “crisis”. What we see as a “crisis” in higher education has often cycled through our work at some point in history and there is a lot to learn from our history. None-the-less I do think we are in the middle of a really unique moment in higher education and being able to stay well informed, open minded and willing to advocate will be important skills for us as professionals.
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