Blogging, You don't know what you don't know.

"You don't know what you don't know"

This has become my mantra of late, at work where we are integrating EMR, electronic medical record documentation into our daily work lives and now as I endeavor to learn about the world of blogging. These two areas may seem incongruent, but not really. There are still ground rules and new verbage that I have to learn, integrate, and then try to use. There are errors that are not easily erased by the rubbery end of a pencil. Instead it is dangerously easy to delete all of what you meant to partially edit and have to start all over. I have learned to put my flat padded mouse pad in front of the monitor so that when I bang my head on the desk I will eliminate the unsightly impressions on my forehead of paper clips, pencils or therapy tools. Goniometer head, not cool.

This process of new learning can be extremely frustrating because of my age. Not really because of my age, but of the era I grew up in. While in line at a fast food restaurant I was fussing at my new phone trying to get rid of the texts hogging the memory and preventing new texts from arriving. I was deleting them one by one. My teen daughter grabbed the phone from me, and in three strokes on the keyboard deleted them all and handed it back to me without missing a beat on her keypad. What I find profoundly frustrating is that I have the capacity to learn, step by step, but my own child would rather just do it for me than spend the time to show me. This is second nature to her because she has grown up with this technology. People of my era simply have a different set of synapses, different brain patterns that don't run parallel to the keystroke progression brain formation of the computer literate generation.

I do know how to research. So I went to www.google.com and searched "Blogging". Wow! tons of stuff popped up.

So I read the post, followed a few links, and did the old fashioned approach to learning by writing notes down in a notebook. Yep. Sure did. I have the need to be able to flip back and forth through pages of notes. No cut and paste, just old fashioned pen and paper. I will be a hybrid blogger.

Perhaps you are thinking to yourself that this post has nothing to do with the title. Well, I now know a little bit more. I didn't know the different platforms for blogging. I didn't really understand that a typical blog combines text, images and links. I didn't know that the word widget has been around since the 1920's, but that blogging really just started around 2005 in what we now call blogging.

Next step? Learn how to add a Widget, and pictures.

Confessions of a novice blogger.

It has been a long time since I posted anything. OK, it has been ages. What can I say? Life, work, kids, they all come before my blogging.

*Hangs head in shame* I am in charge of a "virtual" book club for my hospital. I say virtual because many of the avid book readers in our group work all kinds of shifts, all different days and times. A hospital is open 24/7. That makes it very hard to have a set schedule without excluding others. So when we set up our group we decided that we would use e-mails, a bulletin board, and newsletters to communicate book news and interests. The newsletters go out once a month, our meeting are more like quarterly. When I cross paths with my fellow co-worker/book club member, I always ask for their input. My questions include "Do you like the newsletter? What books do you want us to bring to our groups attention? Is there anything else you would like us to do?" What they don't hear me ask out loud: "Do you read my newsletters? Do you look at our bulletin board? Am I bothering you? Do you still want to be part of this group?"

I read of how authors become insecure about their writing, and here I am insecure about my leadership in a book club! Perhaps readers are also solitary figures, who until the advent of social networking pretty much kept their love of reading to themselves or in the shared lines of the bookstore or library. Then along came blogging.

The truth is, I am a novice blogger. A book club member wanted to know about book blogging. And I found myself stumbling in my explanation. I told her that blogging was when you talk about "stuff" on the internet where people could read it and respond. That was it. My entire explanation. Then she has to ask me to show her how to do become a blogger. Oh oh. Sigh.

I didn't explain to her that I really know next to nothing. That this blog I started is really just an experiment that I started but never expanded upon. That I have like a total of 12 posts. Do I even have any followers?

I am stubborn. After all, everything you need to know is on the internet to explain it all. I have started this little blog. So it's not as though I know nothing. If other people can learn this, I can too. One step at a time.

Step One: Find my focus.
Done! My focus is I will write about book things.

Step Two: Don't over reach.
So I will commit to writing a blog post once a week. That is doable indeed. As I already write a monthly newsletter, perhaps I can include "stuff" from that to here. Perhaps as part of my blog posts I can chronicle my posts so that it will show step by step what I have learned. Now I just have to figure out how to do that. So how do I do that.

Going now to do my research. See ya next week!