Ownership is a tricky thing when your passion and your work overlap — you do a great job of juggling it. And I like the fact that as an aggregator you’ve taken the time to think about what and why you post. You add value because you do inject your personality into what you do.

I feel constrained on my work blog and because I don’t own the content — am reluctant to post things that I’ve spent my own time and effort to research. It’s something I think the company has to come to grips with as well — what do they want on the company-branded blog? Because I know I’d feel awkward about posting off-topic things like my Australian Citizenship ceremony or Pumpkin Pie recipe there. Yet these are topics that I want to share and have conversations about.

Cheers to you both and many thanks for contributing to my learning journey!

KerryJ

The organisation for which I work has so many stakeholders that I feel I have to have my own blog at times. But even when I’m being controversial in my opinion, I try to maintain that sense of balance that years in journalism instilled in me. I agree that younger learners need to be guided through all of this. Too many of them — from the famous to the unintentionally infamous — seem to be blowing it.

Cheers

KerryJ

So I think there’s something to be said for your observation that you may want to promote the blog a bit. You don’t have to turn into a shill for yourself, but you should list your blog address when you comment elsewhere (as I have done here) and link back and forth between your work and personal blog.

As for myself, my publishing profile has evolved as follows:

If something is private, I don’t post it online. Period.

My main website, downes.ca, has always had the status of a pseudo-work blog. I set it up on my own server, then for a time it was on the NRC’s server, then (after some complaints went to the Director) it went back on to my own personal server.

My personal blog is halfanhour.blogspot.com and is explicitly for personal work. That does not prevent me from posting work-related stuff there, and in fact, most of the posts could be called work-related. Mostly, the distinction is that new long stuff goes on Half an Hour, and old long stuff and short stuff goes on downes.ca

Because I code downes.ca as well, I use it for lots of experiments and the like. NRC owns my work-related work, no matter where it’s created. I released the engine I use for downes.ca, gRSShopper, as open source software a few months ago. So I can continue to use it should I ever end my time at NRC.

So – overall, what does this mean?

Basically, for me, _all_ my blogs are personal. I don’t have a “work blog” and would resist creating one, precisely because a work blog would cease to be a personal blog, and would be required to adhere to certain standards, because (no matter what the disclaimers) it would be viewed as representative.

A private blog, by contrast, has basically free reign. Yes, what I do reflects on NRC, but this still leaves me a very broad scope of activity. But I can basically do what I want.

Facebook to me is public too. I’d never post something private on Facebook.

In principle I’m happy to communicate private stuff via email, but I generally don’t because text is an awful vehicle for nuance and emotion.

I gather Kerry that your professional blog is official and endorsed by your organisation. My professional blog isn’t. And yet, I wouldn’t publically criticise my school on my professional blog, in the same way that I wouldn’t criticise my school via a microphone in front of a large crowd of people. I don’t think I’d aggressively take up a cause or a principle in direct contradiction to the causes and principles of my school, either. If I felt THAT strongly about something at work, I would channel the energy into changing it, or I’d leave. So even if the blog isn’t official, there’s no getting away from my identity as a representative of my school. In my mind, my public reputation and my school’s are intertwined, and my blogging is not just my interface with the world but one of my school’s interfaces. I even see it as part of my role at school to publish our students activities and engage online. My school and I are very much on the same wavelength so there has never been any difficulty in this area anyway.

My definition of ‘private’ is simple – anything I’m not comfortable with everyone in the whole world knowing/reading/viewing. The word ‘personal’ is something entirely different. I post personal things on Facebook, Twitter, and both blogs, and on my YouTube account. Personal, but not private, in that I’m happy for everyone and anyone to access these things.

There are no shades of grey for me, no in-betweens. It’s either there for the whole world to see and I’m ok with that, or I’d never consider posting it. There is never a time that this filter gets turned off. I never have my ‘guard down’ when posting – it’s always a conscious decision… “Yes, this can go on the record.”

One reason I’m so keen to use online social spaces and blogging with students is so they have some guided experience through these issues. Some kids are cluey with this stuff, but some are clueless.

Just ramblings, but I think that’s what you’re after