Reflecting publicly or privately?

These reflective entries provide a view of your personal learning journey. Since you will be reflecting upon your professional practice, you have to keep your students and members of your community in mind. Perhaps you should write about the topics in a manner that does not give away their identity? What I tend to give as a guideline is that you shouldn't write anything you couldn't yell out on a bus.

When it comes to thinking of whether to make it public or not, I would ask why would you want to keep your learning journey and thoughts to yourself? Learning to write about your personal learning journey in a way that can help others can make the impact so much bigger. Even if you get just one person who finds your blog 2 years after you have written it, it might offer them the exact support they are after.

Should I blog anonymously?

Anonymous blogging allows some people to be more honest than they might be if their real names were attached. You might have noticed that writing under a different name or alias allows some people to express different aspects of their personality, including parts that may not be appropriate to show at other times. But if there is no need to be anonymous, why would you? I would also like to remind you that staying anonymous online might be much harder than you think. 

Having said that, you can also just hand in a (word/pdf) document of your learning tasks if you desire to do so. But if you make the effort to raise the discussion openly, we would certainly appreciate that.

As Ryan Merkley, the Chief Executive Officer of Creative Commons, suggests collaboration, sharing, and co-operation are in our nature. This is yet another opportunity to embrace that!

Could this help me to develop my professional online identity?

Thinking beyond our personal benefit is at the core of why we share, and I would suggest that maybe it is at the core of why we are teachers? Sharing pays itself forward also in reputation and it rewards us with good feelings and personal gratification. Sharing also contributes to our individual identity — how we want to see ourselves, and be seen, in the world. 

These critical reflections are going to be quite short, so why not make them such that help you to create an interesting professional online identity? You get to show how you have the courage to share your deep and evaluative thinking; that you are not afraid to openly reflect to become better at what you do.

Which privacy settings should I consider?

When creating a blog, there are settings you can change that affect how private or public your blog becomes. Different blogging platforms provide different privacy setting options. Perhaps you want to restrict if the search engines can find it. This is something you can many times choose in the "Settings" section. Just bear in mind, that bear in mind that even if you restrict that, anyone can add links to your blog from their pages.   

You want to keep in mind that allowing comments, and showing the date of your posts are something that defines a blog. Those features differentiate a blog from a static website. 

Some of you might want to limit your blog's readers so that only those invited by emails can view it. The "Settings" section has many times features that you can do this with. For example, in Blogger you can change your 'Reader access' from 'Public' to 'Private to authors', or 'Custom Readers' that you can add manually to your blog. For some, this is a good way to start their blogging journey, and after a while, they might realise they are actually ready to public it to the world. 

Even if you make your blog public it likely takes a long time before you get any readers. It takes a while before search engine bots scan it, and if you want people to read your blog you need to let them know it exists! 

If you still have some burning questions relating to blogging, remember to post those here as comments or use our Slack channel to get more help from your peers. Enjoy the ride!  

References:

EFF. (2005, April 6). How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). https://www.eff.org/wp/blog-safely

Merkley. R. (2016, January 12). We Need To Talk About Sharing. https://creativecommons.org/2016/01/12/where-are-we/