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.