Dr. Inger Mewburn…Her Twitter description is: Does research on research student experience ( yes – really) and edits the Thesis Whisperer blog. I think this lecture was awesome!!! I loved the way she spoke about herself in two ways. Herself as a blog and her real self. She was extremely helpful in making me realise how I need to speak and articulate myself in my blog. She gave awesome examples and metaphors. I think she was a really interesting person and one of the greatest speakers i’ve heard.

This is her blog: thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/ Just so I don’t forget

One of her main points was ‘creating a sense of presence’ within a blog – If your trying to pose in your wrtiting, pretending to be something ur not, it takes a very skilled writer to overcome that. When writing a blog there has to be a sense of someone being there, a personality in a blog.

We are taught that knowledge is a possession. Plagiarism is one of the mechanisms in which we teach in academia that knowledge belongs to them. You start to think that you cant give away what you know. In blogs you have to give away something about yourself of what you know. This is completely different to how we were taught to teach and learn. This will be BLOODy hard to get my around…

Collaborative blog – We want to be concise, we want to learn from peoples stories, we want to stimulate conversations etc.

Just a small point – Don’t reference in your first paragraph because then its not you. It sets up what you are going to talk about.

Something I could think about doing – Write in someones else’s blog and let them write for you. AND BE RUTHLESS. Fix each others writing. Editing people without pissing them off is really hard. Edit it while trying to keep their voice. Prune back their writing and give it shape and leave a question at the end. That makes people want to comment on your post, it gives them permission. Helpful to see someone edit your own work.

More tips - Blog writing – write like you talk, but the better version. Read your post out loud. Listening to yourself and your voice is important.

Cool metaphor – Dinner Party – (Table of 6) Think about your blog as a dinner party. If you only had to choose 6 people to have in your conversation, who would it be?? How would you introduce them to each other???? Its a metaphor that helps you do curation. The purpose of curation is educational – the dinner table forces you to choose a certain number of people. You want them to be interesting so that the conversation is productive and interesting. MORE DIVERSE. You are the host at this table, actively in there Curating and being part of the conversation.

Images - www.morguefile.com…Photos that professionals have thrown out. Sets the tone of the piece. I want to use this site to change up the texture of my blogs and get some more images happening!

Fuzz - excess words which do not add value.

Books: ‘Writing to Learn’, ‘On Writing’ (Zinsser)