It is simple and versatile. You can easily embed videos, pictures, links, photos or just write your own text. Of course, you can do all this with conventional blogs, but I have found them to be a bit fiddlier. With tumblr, you can install a button in your bookmarks, and as soon as you read something interesting on line, stick it straight on your blog.
You can also post through a unique email address. This appeals to me as someone who spends a bit of time on trains everyday. I can send my morning thoughts straight from my mobile phone to my blog.
You control your tumblr through the dashboard, and once we have all set one up we can “follow” each other. That means we can see each time one of the other group members updates, and click over to respond or just have a further look.
There are a couple of downsides – the first is that is not totally private. However, you can disable the search engine function which means it won’t be listed on google, yahoo etc. That means people will only find it if directed towards it.
The second problem is getting comments. If you register with http://disqus.com/ using the same email address you use to register your tumblr, they will give you a small piece of code and tell you where to cut and paste it. It’s really not too scary! If you have any trouble, let me know….
But apart from anything else, it’s a conceptual choice. Conventional blogs ask you to “publish”, you hone your words carefully, arrange them on the page, play with the fonts, the links, the colours…. when you open tumblr, you get an empty box. You type in it, and click. It seems so much more suited to the stream of consciousness of reflection and the process over product approach.
I started teaching about ten years ago now, in a large chain school in Japan. After a week’s training, off I went to my first school… managed to survive my first year and went off to Australia to get my CELTA. Then I went back to Japan and with my incredible qualifications and extensive experience (!) was promoted to head trainer. It was a great job in many ways, and I spent a lot of time travelling around the country observing other teachers, several a week, and (good or bad) took something from every class. However, long term growth and security was limited…the company “methodolgy”, although actually fairly sound, was geared towards short, compact conversation lessons. I left to return to England to take an MA and DELTA, and also to teach on the pre- and in-sessional programmes at a university. With a CELTA, and having passed the entry criteria for further study, I was deemed fit to take multinational/lingual classes in academic reading and writing - hah! Well, this was my first insight into the world of “development” as opposed to “training”. My experience in Japan had been of a fairly prescriptive approach, with me doing the prescribing. This time, I had to develop my own solutions… My automatic response, conditioned by the way I had learnt so much before, was to find a more experienced teacher to observe. That’s what I did, and along with all the reading and discussion on my courses, I didn’t do too horribly badly. The interesting thing I took from this was how my peers and I had our own reactions to our new contexts, which led to my dissertation research on how teachers adapt to self-initiated change. I had some great tutors and (for want of a better term) “co-learners”, and I was particularly affected by the teacher education module I took. I think a lot of us were disappointed at first; it wasn’t the nuts and bolts “this is how you observe a teacher” we were expecting, there was a lot of abstract talk about mirrors and refraction, and these awful personal journals we were supposed to keep. I read some interesting things, though… David Little’s 1995 article about learner autonomy and teacher autonomy, Fred Korthagen, Donald Schon, Michel Huberman, Frances Fuller, Tessa Woodward etc.. and did enough to pass. I think this stuff sits somewhere until you are actually ready to learn it… I’m just about to start my third year teaching in Japanese universities, and the idea of reflection has become more and more important to me. I write book reviews to keep myself reading critically, and I am lucky enough to work in a collegiate and sharing office. However, despite my best efforts, I cannot keep a diary - I make copius notes, but I think it is very hard to challenge oneself with new questions. Self assessment in it’s baldest state (What went wrong in that class?) is stale and negative. I read deeper and deeper to find an answer, and came across a couple of books which pointed to a way forward. The first was Gillie Bolton’s book on creative writing - she is not from the field of language education and mostly works with medical practitioners, in itself refreshing, but also had a number of great ways of breaking out of the reflective rut using metaphor and writing from new perspectives. I read Farrells latest book on reflection which championed the idea of teacher develoment groups, and coupled with a few things I wrote about online teacher development (and only now am starting to believe…), here I am. This was longer than it was supposed to be ; )
