I just saw this post and a thought occured to me, so I wanted to get it down in writing, on the blog, before I forget it. That’s exactly what blogging is, or one form of it: what Will Richardson calls “opinions in progress“.

Blog postings are usually off the top of one’s head, so to speak, and not carefully crafted essays. Of course, some people do take the trouble to write very careful entries. But for others, blog postings are akin to thinking aloud about a topic. For some, the blog is a way of tracking research on a topic, exploring ideas, taking notes, and sharing those thoughts with others and getting feedback through comments.

So, if you read something on a blog (certainly on this blog of mine), don’t conclude that a post is necessarily my final thoughts on a topic. Indeed, I may ultimately change my mind completely about an issue that I’ve written about here and, yet, forget to go back and update the posting.

Interpreting blogs have interesting implications for historians in terms of how they will analyze blog postings.Blogs also have a far more important implication for people today. I’ve learned in any organization that miscommunications are the biggest source of problems and conflict among co-workers and supervisors in an organization. It’s obvious then that one’s own blogging could inevitably lead to miscommunications within one’s workplace if one’s co-workers, boss, or employees read your blog. I’m willing to bet that if you’re a boss, then all of your computer literate employees read your blog very closely, much more closely than you would expect.

Another implication of blogging as opinions in progress relates to students who haven’t learned how to contextualize and understand the role of blogging in the world of information. A student’s misunderstanding of information learned through a blog is another factor that needs to be addressed through teaching analytical and critical thining skills.

Will Richardson points out that students also need to be taught transactional writing skills:

we have to begin introducing the idea of transactional writing, of writing in and for networked audiences that are invited into the conversation. The more they understand that writing is a part of a process of learning and not just a product of it, the better off they will be.