A blog about blogs (Part 1)

The DPG community is a community of practice, a shared space for professionals with an interest in Learning and Development & HR to come together and share their experiences, ideas and good practice.

It's a collaborative and social space that supports our CIPD programmes, provide evidence for CPD and is a space for our customers to discuss our products & services in an open and transparent way. It's about conversation and more importantly around people; people who are willing to share and learn. This sharing drives value in both personal and professional development and in turn drives value for others.

The most popular discussion on the community so far as been Fiona Chatham's discussion Taking Time Out To Reflect

There are some excellent points around how to reflect and gather CPD evidence the reflection process and it got me thinking about the role of blogs and the impact they have had on my own personal development over the last two years.

I think blogs can be misunderstood and that got me thinking about how this community can start supporting its members get more from blogs either through starting a blog or finding really good blogs that are interesting, thought provoking or even controversial. So here it is the blog about blogs (Part 1).....

Reading blogs

Time is often cited as the main reason for a lack of personal development yet it can only take a few minutes to read a blog. OK reading a blog won't perhaps give you practical skills in running a team or facilitating a training session or help you through a large change programme...BUT it will stimulate ideas and provide an insight in to others' experiences who have done or are doing this. It's this reading processes that provides access to new ideas and rich sources of information, if there are comments it may also provide reasoned argument or other resources and even more peoples' experiences that they have been willing to share. To get ourselves set up to get access to blogs with the minimum of fuss we need a RSS reader to aggregate the blogs so it takes the effort out of finding these dynamite development tools.

I would suggest using something Feed Demon but there are others out there for both PC and MAC users. All offer similar functionality but it's down to personal preference which one you use.

Finding blogs

There are plenty of blogs out there, some of which are fantastic and others well.....let's say they are less read. This is where this discussion can help as I'm calling all members to add a link to their favourite blogs (or even their own blog) in the comments to help others find those belting blogs that cause us to think and help us to innovate, change and disrupt what we do normally. So here are 12 blogs I enjoy reading to get you started:

I hope you find these blogs interesting, exciting, challenging and thought provoking. All you need is to open the link and look for the 'Subscribe To' button, once clicked you can then add the RSS feed in to your RSS reader and boom, you're away - every time there is a new post it will automatically appear in your RSS reader ready for reading.

It really is easy to read one blog a day.....you just need to get in to the habit of reading them. Finding 5 minutes during your day to support your development is no great sacrifice is it? I guarantee that by doing this you will be exposed to far greater information and knowledge than you would have without reading them, this can then help inform and develop your own ideas. This is Continuous Professional Development, you might not see it like that but it is a great way of keeping your professional knowledge up to date and continually refreshed and indeed at the cutting edge of thinking in your profession.

So that's your task, get your RSS reader up and running and start reading a blog a day to support your CPD. If you have any questions post them below and share your favourite blogs below as well - we'd love to read them too.

Part 2 will follow shortly (commenting on blogs and starting your own)

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  • Just come across a great list of RSS readers that you might find useful. Crowd sourced from social tools of course :-)

    http://list.ly/list/33u-google-reader-alternatives-crowdsourced-list

  • Some great stuff there Blake. If you ever fancy writing a blog in here that would be great. You can check my blog here www.learningasylum.co.uk

    Watch our for the next instalment of this blog and post a link to your next post in latest activity :-)

  • yes we've got www.optimussourcing.com/blog with my blogs generally appearing on this subcategory http://www.optimussourcing.com/category/hints-and-tips

    Had a couple of articles on TrainingJournal recently which I'm very pleased about.  Since I've started so many ideas come in to my head which I could write about. 

    Discovered linking Word 2010 to WordPress which is a great little tool. 

    Good luck.

    Blake

  • Hi Blake, thanks for your comment. I've found an RSS to be a life saver or sometimes just subscribing to blogs via email helps as it means they come to you rather than the other way around.

    Do you have a blog yourself or do you write blogs as part of your CPD? I've been blogging for just under a year now and have really noticed the benefits in my writing style and the way in which I think about things.

    Mike

  • Thanks Mike this is very useful.  Am trying to write more blogs as well as spend an hour a day on developing so knowing about good RSS readers will help me out.  

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