Full Circle Associates

OEDb released a list of their staff'sTop 100 Education Blogs late last year. Jimmy Atkinson alerted me that my blog was on the list. I scratched my head. Why me?

Last month I received an Edublogger award for a paper I wrote. When the paper was nominated, I realized it was never written from a strictly education point of view. But it was published in a education related journal, the Knowledge Tree.

It dawned on me that I am perceived as an edublogger.

Now this is a beautiful thing to me, because I read and admire the work and spirit of so many edubloggers. Or people I perceive to be edubloggers. I feel quite wonderful that some people count me in to this community.

It caused me to think about the trajectory that landed me here. My best guess is because the education sector shares an interest in how we communicate online and the edublogging community has a practice of talking about it. While most of my work is in the NGO/NPO sector, there is not a large community of people talking about online interaction in the non profit world. It is pretty small.

So the edublogging community gives me another strong community of practice where I can learn, share my thinking and ask others to help improve it, and swap stories of practice. I feel greatful and happy to contribute. It works. So part of this association with edublogging I believe has been opportunity.

This is also an example of the network-like blog communities I wrote about, where what we are interested in can connect us through the features of the online interaction tools we are using. Search. Tagging. Links.

Through our content, what we choose to write about, we provide the fodder for other people's perception of us. Our public identity.

With blogging, we can certainly set out to project a particular identity. But what I sense is that our ongoing words in our posts really create the identity. Particularly when so many people are reading blog posts through their feed readers without all the bling we put on our blogs that might give more overt cue about how we wish others to perceive us.