Guidelines for Writing Good Learning Blogs

Using blogs inside the enterprise can create a lot of learning opportunities as transactions become transparent, accessible, and easily subject to search unlike email, most project management tools, etc. Learning here is a buy product of simply using blogs and other Enterprise 2.0 tools. What about making these tools function better as learning vehicles by adopting some guidelines from instructional design? This is what Karl Kapp and Lisa Neal do in their eLearn Magazine piece, Blogging to Learn and Learning to Blog.

As Karl and Lisa write, “Applying the instructional-design principles of organization and information-chunking makes a blog easier to read and more efficient for employees, without burdening the author. Providing templates and guidelines for blog creators can increase the usefulness of blogs and make them lead to a richer learning experience for busy employees.”

They mention the usefulness of a Table of Contents. This works best for a document with a beginning and an end. Blogs are a continuous stream with an ever evolving “table of contents.” However, I like their idea. It would be better than the list of categories that blogs have now. It would be useful to take the category concept and transform it into a flexible table of contents that the author can change and reorder. The exercise of maintaining this table of contents will help the blog writer to consider the themes that are covered and how they evolve.

There are other useful ideas in their work. Part of writing a good blog is also simply good writing. Since we often write blog posts and comments quickly we get lazy in our writing I know that I do. Here is a classic set of rules from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” that Brad Berens recently posted.

(1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(2) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. business blogs

Comments

[Brad Berens]

Hi Bill,
Many thanks for reading Mediavorous. I'll look forward to keeping track of your blog hereafter.

Best,

Brad Berens
www.bradberens.com