Syndicate and Hague

There’s lots of talk in my academic life of “authentic learning,” something I’m personally quite the fan of. But I’m thinking of it in terms of my writing. I had this dumb idea that I would create a second blog that would be just for compiling all of my research into one place and commenting on it.

Why was this a dumb idea? Because it’s not at all how I actually process information.

I don’t think it was a dumb idea to start a second blog to save you good people from having to read things about academia and research (not that I’ve even written anything yet, that’s how dumb this idea was). It was just a dumb idea to think that it was useful to force a round peg like me (learns by talking about ideas/informal discussion) into a square hole (an empirical blog - seriously! dumb!).

It really shows some deeply embedded (and wrong) philosophy in my own brain about what writing is. It’s what I’m going to call “Research Paper 101 writing.” Like forming coherent paragraphs and boring sentences somehow means you know something/learned something. I don’t believe that even in theory, so why do I believe it in my gut? It feels like a religion I have to unlearn, to get deprogrammed from.

And so it goes. Screw empirical writing on blogs. That’s totally inauthentic. Give me colloquial…fragmented sentences…thinking out loud and in public…sticking my foot in my mouth…setting myself up for a challenge…