A little more than a year ago I wrote my first blog, just to experience what is was like to write one. I didn’t really understood why people wanted to share all kind of things with others. My first blog (which I called ‘my first blog’) didn’t even had a proper subject, I just wrote a blog to see what would happen. I introduced myself and wrote a little about the online Educa I just visited. To my surprise quite a number of people read it and they encouraged me to continue and really start blogging.
I decided to continue and to use the same ground rules I use for all social media; I just use them for my work or work related things. So no stories about how much I love my wife and kids, or that my dog has died. For the first post I named my blog Kasper Spiro’s blog. After that I decided to rename it to ‘Change to learn’, simply because change and (e) learning are the two consistent threads through my working career. Another thing I decided was to write in English, partly because I have a lot of international contacts, but mostly to practice and improve my English writing skills (Yes learning by doing is my preferred learning style). I hope that my learning process didn’t hinder you too much in reading my posts. I got a lot of feedback on the fact that I took a cow by the horns instead of a bull, but most comments where about the content, so I guess that the message comes across.
I wrote 26 blogs, generating 2900 hits; that’s a little over a 100 per blog. My best read post was on output management, but that is because the author of the book I wrote about (Filip vandenDriesche) placed a link on his output manager website to my blog. I had my first blog dip, I published no blogs between July and November. That had a lot to do with my plan to leave Stoas, I found it difficult to blog in that situation.
These are not very impressive figures, but the funny part is that I’m writing more and more for myself and not for someone else. Blogging is a way of putting my thoughts into a few hundred words, and that is a great learning experience. Jay Cross told me that he writes 4 blogs, but only publish two of them. The other two are just a way of catching thoughts and ideas and reflect on them. That’s the way it works for me more and more. I have a hole bundle of draft blogs that I will never publish. But by writing them, I forced myself to think about these topics in a different manner and make my ideas concrete by writing them down. The other thing is that you create a history. I’m never much into looking back and evaluating (I’m more a here and now kind of guy). But reading back on the posts (published and unpublished) gives a great overview of the past year. It was a turbulent year full of important changes and there is a lot to learn from. I guess my blog title was more appropriate then I suspected a year ago.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
