How Honest Can You be While Blogging?
A while ago, my friend and blogging idol, Bud Hunt, recently wrote about an experience in which someone wrote an article about teachers blogging. In the article, which was poorly researched, the author thought that Bud was blogging anonymously, assuming that budtheteacher was a username that he hid behind. Bud corrected her.
Then today I was writing an e-mail to a colleague about blogging, expressing my hesitations about writing honestly on a blog.
I’ve been a member of the NCTE-talk listserve (now called engteach-talk and hosted at interversity) for many years and have always been careful what I post. My thought is that anything I send out onto a listserve or blog could be picked up by just about anyone. In fact, if I google my name, I get hits in the archives of both NCTE-talk and engteach-talk, some of them from years ago. In the non-English teaching world, I also read several personal finance blogs. On those I see some people discussing their personal finance situation in detail, without names but with actual numbers and names of banks. It makes me very, very afraid for them.
So while I like blogging, I always try to be careful what I say. Not that I have huge amounts of nasty things to say, but that we all know how easy it is to misinterpret what we initially thought were simple, benign thoughts.
I don’t know where that leaves me. I like blogging because we can share ideas. But can we ever really share them honestly if we think or fear someone might be listening in? Is is worse for people who are not tenured and do not have job security? Perhaps this is why some people do not want to blog or read blogs. Perhaps this is why it is still crucial that we develop actual, personal conversation with colleagues. Perhaps this is why we still need to work together in departments, attend conferences and still go to meetings.
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