CONIECTO

I hate myself for being such a super-procrastinator. I feel like blogging and I make drafts, but I never allowed myself the time for finishing them in the last three weeks.

Because I have pressing deadlines, some of them connected with blogging, I almost imposed myself not to blog... while still blogging.

Let me explain this:
I'm running a course on ... blogging. My university back home is part of a EU project trying to adapt the Portfolio Evaluation Method to IT courses taught to adults. The topic I chose for my online course was, of course, blogging. The learners group selected itself, while I was talking to different people about my plans. They are of different ages, backgrounds and professions. I don't know all of them personally. I was very enthusiastic about this endeavour, and still I am, but:

1. nothing works as planned;
2. it's extremely time consuming.

Except these two "little" drawbacks, the rest is very exciting. Now let's detail a bit:
What was planned - learners picking up a topic for their blog and blogging regularly;
You bet! I had to talk to them via IM, personal emails, discussion list, class blog - encouraging them, promising rewards, even threatening them, because even if charmed by the idea in the beginning, they were actually paralyzed to have to publish anything.

Blogging regularly - we had this talk at BlogWalk2 - blogging is fun, but if somebody would force you to blog every morning, will it still be fun? Or it will be perceived as a burden? In the beginning, I told them nice words like "you don't have to blog if you don't feel like!", "I'm not going to force you to blog", "I am not going to be your teacher, but your coach running side by side and encouraging you, so you can find your own rythm..." etc. Well, I had to abandon my good intentions and to set clear deadlines, otherwise some of them would have never found the courage to start.

The topic: I didn't set any topic- they had to choose one. All I asked for - bearing in mind the project itself- was to write on the blog some of their impressions about blogging and them learning to blog. I am not sure all of them do have now a central topic (even if they declared one in their blog presentation), but I am confident they are on their way and they will eventually find a central topic (or more) that fits them best.

The tone: that was a difficult one - finding their own voices! Some persuasion was necessary to convince them abandon the textbook-like objective tone, or the plain reproduction of stories found elsewhere on the web. I showed them all kind of examples - but it's a matter of personality. One of them used to work for a local radio station - well, he's blogging the same way he was talking on air, mixing allkind of information. There are posts sounding like emails to our group, others ressembling to official press releases. I don't mind! The important thing is to go on, till they'll fin their own voice.

The language: Romanian or English? This was another dilemma. Mixing languages or having separate blogs? We have an English teacher in the group- she naturally switched to English and started to receive foreign visitors, received banner exchange invitations and was co-opted in another more specific blogging course. Browsing the blogosphere, they found blogs of interest for their own topic and added them to the blogroll, which lead to reactions.

Then, a whole debate started moving from one blog to another: what do we consider to belong to the Romanian blogosphere? Blogs written in Romanian by Romanians? Blogs written in English by Romanians? Blogs in any other language about Romania - written by foreigners living both in Romania and abroad? (Troniu built quite a taxonomy in this regard!)
In other words, what is decisive: the blogger's origin, the topic or the language? After coming to a conclusion, I may volunteer to write something for Blogcount , because there are some very interesting developments in the Romanian blogosphere (whatever are we naming with this term!). We had a blog contest, then a blog comment war, and several people build lists of Romanian RSS sources (Timsoft, RSS RO ). As a result, my Romanian Bloggers blogroll grew every day, I met some very interesting people, and they asked me lots of technical questions motivating me to look for solutions to my old unsolved problems.

It's time consuming, because beside the course blog and the current "blogger newbie" group (could we invent a blogbie word? ;-), I am trying to build a repository of information on blogging in Romanian language and also to keep in touch with as many Romanian bloggers as possible.
Even if most of the Romanian blogosphere is made now of people who read and write English (more than half of the Romanian blogs on my blogroll are in English!) and are kind of techies, I keep on hoping that we will succeed to attract some other categories to blog very soon.

And I spend so much time because I keep learning myself in the process: I never felt as a teacher, I feel as one of the learners. We're not in a classroom anymore, we're on the beach sitting on the sand around the fire and thinking of solutions for few of our problems. I never pretended I knew everything - maybe I have some good searching skills and a bit more experience - and I really enjoy this new situation. Barbara Ganley's talk from last year's Blogtalk sound more actual than ever to me. And her concerns are mine too.

Would you like to know what I did this morning ? Went through my Bloglines subscriptions, found Martin's post on rel="nofollow", read through his references and some other, and wrote a post on Prinsea about it. I felt like I should, can't explain why. Maybe because I was not sure it's a good idea from the very beginning. If the news would suddenly decide to stop mentioning thefts, murders and rapes(which would be quite a blessing, in my opinion!) would this prevent criminality?

And now that I started, I think I will keep on blogging here (instead of cleaning my desk!) and procrastinate again my other tasks till tomorrow. After all, it's Sunday, and Steve Pavlina wisely advises us to keep a free-of-work day every week!