One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging lately is I have a chance to work full time and utilize my degree for the first time in a long time. When I was at my graduate school internship five years ago, MIT was just starting to talk about putting their course materials online. Now, five years later, about 80% of the classes have some material online, and the rest are soon to follow. Many other universities and K-12 institutions are also sharing their material and making it available for use and reuse (most often with a Creative Commons license).
It’s wonderful to see the progress that has been made in five years, but daunting to try to catch up on what I missed in the field while I was away. Thankfully, there are blogs for everything, including several discussing Open Educational Resources, OpenCourseWare, eLearning, and similar subjects. One leader in the field made his opml file available for download, so I added that to my reader and have been going through the blogs and postings. All 3000 postings. I’ve gotten through about half of those in two hours, scanning the titles of each blog, unsubscribing to many blogs that aren’t relevant to the specific work I’m doing.
And probably unsubscribing to some that ARE relevant, but have post titles that are undescriptive. Blogs with post titles such as “Sweet!”, “Hello”, and “Is It Me?” are likely to get removed and never looked at again, while “Required Structure in Learning Environment” gives me enough information to know if it is something relevant and if I should take a look at it.
The lack of descriptive titles surprises me. I’ve grown accustomed to reading SEO and SEM blogs, where people are aware of the value of titles for both their readers and for the search engines, and I can get the gist of a posting from just the title. In part I am surprised because I’m not talking about teenagers and MySpace blogs, but about professionals writing about high-level topics regarding education, learning, and technology.
Twenty questions was a great way to pass the time on long car trips when I was a kid. Twenty obtuse post titles is not the way to get new readers or convince people (or Google) that your posts have some relevancy to a topic.
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