I am a devout advocate of blogging, not only as a great means of enhancing your personal brand but for how it benefits your learning. It's a fantastic way of putting your thoughts into writing and gaining feedback and input from other people around the world.
By all means however don't take my word for this. A study done back in the 1970's looked at how we learn. Participants who thought deeply about the words remembered nearly twice as many as participants who only thought shallowly about the words, regardless of whether they intended to remember them or not.
So the implications seem clear to me. After all, most teaching is still delivered to students with the expectations that, like sponges, they will absorb all that is thrown at them.
This research suggests that if you want to absorb something then you need to think about it deeply. What better way to do so than to jot down your thoughts into a blog and enjoy the intellectual joust as comments flood in (hopefully).
I don't blog myself but comment on a good number. Having a good ol' debate on a topic is a great way to absorb it into your memory.
Offline I like to jot things down in an old fashioned note book.
That's it. Having to defend your point of view forces you to think about it in quite some depth. I'm currently learning (or trying to learn) Czech, so am contemplating having a category on the blog where I post purely in Czech to see if that will help my learning.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on blogging. I just had a conversation with my sister on this exact topic! She is a new professor and is not open to any social media as a method for learning in and out of the classroom. I will be sure to share this with her.
That's great Ana. Let me know how you get on.