Blogging - Quantity or Quality

Had an interesting discussion with a colleague today about blogs - whether its better to write good, well edited, well thought through posts every so often or whether you should post as often as possible in what ever way you can effectively articulate your thoughts. What do you think?

I suppose if you have read any of this blog you know that its more the "just get it out there" type of blog. I make no apologies for this. It is my blog and I choose to use primarily as a way of expressing what I believe to be true and invite people to correct me if I am wrong. This serves me in two ways - allows for reflective learning and also exposes my thoughts and beliefs for analysis to be contradicted and so I have the opportunity to correct any misconceptions I may have on a subject through a feedback loop.

Today I had a listen to Stephen Downes talk on the role of Open Educational Resources in personal learning - MP3 . Stephen talks about how knowledge can be viewed as a network of nodes and how nodes interact with each other. To that end my "knowledge" must be viewed as a mere node in a bigger network of individuals - for the network to learn I need to expose my thoughts for other nodes to contradict, contribute and concur with my thoughts, reasoning and logic. In turn I leave comments on other people's blogs to do the same. This is essentially how the network as a whole learns and becomes better.

So in conclusion - yes, I admit it, I throw rambling thoughts up on this blog. Why? Well to reflect on them and to invite comment - good, bad or indifferent.

What to do with all my time

So I seem to have all this extra time on my hands while I am "between jobs" (I hope). So I need a project to do. I have been trying to think what to do with myself while I wait for a job. So far I have come up with the following:

1)Learn iPhone development and I have been doing this, but I need to think up a good iPhone app to develop to keep my interest and so far I have come up with very little. Anyone out there got any ideas?

2)Learn Spanish - okay this seems like a good idea but I need money for classes, but I could get a start on learning Spanish using one of those tape set things - some of them are meant to be pretty good. So I headed over to my local library and I find 3 beginner Spanish kits - but they all are missing CD1 so no good - might try other libraries in my area, but seriously if you borrow that kind of stuff don't lose the first CD - the its useless for everyone else! Although I did find the site livemocha.com, which might be good as it connects you with native Spanish speakers and helps you learn that way.

3)Refresh my statistics knowledge - I have been working through Hank Ibser lecture videos on iTunes. I now realise the amount of stats I have forgotten - its a good opportunity to refresh these principles in my mind - stats is one of those subjects that its always good to have fresh in your mind, I think.

4)Drupal - It might be good to learn drupal due to its growing popularity - if I have time.

5) Java - my Java skills have gone downhill due to my lack of practice - maybe I should do a refresher course, or maybe I should take on another language, perhaps python?

There are loads of other things that I could do - but it would be good to think up a project that incorporates all of the above hmmmm. I have a habit of trying to do too many things at once. Perhaps I should concentrate on one? What would you do?

Relearning through iTunesU - Class starts today

At the start of most years I always like to try to learn new things. This year I decided to do something a bit different, I am going to relearn things that I learned a long time ago - I am going to do refresher courses. I have decided to do all this using iTunesU. This is really a great resource, my only problem about it is that it is in Apple propriety software - you need iTunes to access.

So what am I going to relearn. After much debate with myself I decided to refresh my technical skills a bit and get to grips data structures and algorithms, computing paradigms (python programming) and statistics again. I also decided to throw in iPhone development from Stanford, just for kicks. I will let you know how I get on..