Visiting? About this blog...

From time to time, posts appear that encourage us (bloggers, that is) to provide newcomers with an introduction to our blogs. I have tended not to do this, because my view was that the handful of readers already knew their way around.

Then recently, I received a message from someone via via via, to the effect that they were unsure how to go about subscribing to my blog. So I decided to rethink things.

First off, I have added a widget just below the blog title for easy subscription via a selection of aggregators. Since I have a Bloglines account, I have a "Sub with Bloglines" button on my browser toolbar, and this is the way I subscribe to any blog that sustains my interest. I recognise that not everyone (a) uses Bloglines as their aggregator and (b) knows how to do this! Apologies for a lack of inclusiveness in my approach.

I tend to be a bit of an end user blogger. I don't know how to add a widget to my blog that tells you how many readers I have had, nor would I know where to start to customise my template. I had to have help from Mark Berthelemy in adding that widget, for example. Mark is a total whizzkid, who fortunately belongs to the same team as I do for his day job. I wouldn't ever have believed that I would meet anyone more passionate about learning than me... and then I met Mark!

Another invaluable source of help has been Vicki Davis, who occasionally posts on "how to" do this, that or the other thing associated with blogging. I think that Vicki is slightly newer to blogging than I am (I started on 13 July 2005), but she has taken the bull by the horns and become a blogger of note in a very short space of time. She is also a very unselfish person and a born teacher who is willing to share what she knows with anyone who's interested.

My blog posts tend to centre around issues associated with learning: learning in general, my own learning experience and my reflections on the experiences of others (often my two sons). My field is the corporate environment, so my focus is on the workplace learner. This is my passion - post-compulsory learning under circumstance which are usually a long way from conducive.

Obviously there is some overlap with the fields of formal education, and my own current journey through a master's degree, coupled with my sons' adventures in a high school system that is alien to me (since I was educated in a different country), mean that I have an interest in this sector as well.

Since we are human and not very easily compartmentalised, I don't stick purely to my own fields of endeavour, but have been known to post about unrelated matters which have touched my life in some way.

Since blogging is in large part a conversation, I am a fairly prolific commenter, and you are likely to come across my name in the comments of many of the blogs listed in my Bloglines. I keep track of these conversation using CoComment, which has been proving increasingly unreliable of late - several conversations going completely unrecorded. I also welcome comments on my own posts, although I recognise that I seldom produce content that is of sufficiently stirring significance to attract a lot of traffic. This doesn't lose me any sleep. Like many other bloggers, my posts are a way of thinking out loud, of getting things of my chest, of committing my thoughts to a space where I can come back to them. If a post serves all these purposes and still strikes a chord for a reader, then that is a double bonus!

If you are new to this blog, I hope that this has been of help to you in some way.