Becoming a blog mentor

As part of my mission (that may be aggrandising it somewhat) to promote blogging in the OU, I have offered to be a blogging mentor to three or four colleagues. The idea is to help them become regular, stable bloggers. They will then promote it to others and soon the whole world will blog! What do you mean pyramid schemes are dodgy?

Anyway, I have no idea what I mean by being a blogging mentor, so we'll have to make it up as we go along. If anyone has done something similar I'd really appreciate any tips. My plan is to be open about it, hence this posting, and to encourage them. I figure if I name them here that will be a motivation to continue for a while anyway.

First out of the blocks is Patrick McAndrew. Patrick has had a few attempts at blogging before, most notably with OCHRE. This was a semi-official blog for the evaluation strand of the openlearn project. I'll let Patrick say more about why he didn't blog as much as he would have liked with this - I think official blogs can feel a bit limiting both in scope ('can I talk about my cats?') and style ('can I make jokes?'), which makes you less inclined to post to them.

Patrick's new blog is here:  http://openpad.wordpress.com/ If he doesn't post at least twice weekly, we'll be after him...

Comments

[Rebecca]

I like the idea of a blogging mentor.
Gill and I are always after Patrick to blog more - but with no great success :-(

[Rebecca]

I like the idea of a blogging mentor.
Gill and I are always after Patrick to blog more - but with no great success :-(

[Gill]

Go for it Martin. You can hardly be less successful that Rebecca and I have been :)

Last time we were chatting with Patrick about his rather stagnant OCHRE blog, he mentioned that he also kept a really really dark blog. He implied, but didn't expressly say that he posted to this blog.....perhaps this was just a ploy to distract us :-D

You just can't tell.