Recently in my normal reading I ran across this blog post by Nathan Marz expounding the merits of a blog. Not long after reading this and letting it percolate through my mental background process I begun a class on Coursera, titled Learning How to Learn. In this midst of this class I realized that the benefits of blogging Nathan promotes are essentially ways to enhance your day to day learning.

I’m convinced, I will join the ranks of bloggers.

While debating with myself on whether this was a worthwhile project I decided my primary goals for a blog are:

• To take ideas and develop them fully.
• To improve my written communication skills.
• To sharpen my brain in regards to forming and analyzing arguments.

The Learning How to Learn course has taught me that writing a blog can be a great tool for attaining those learning goals in a number of ways.

First the very name of this blog is a reflection that I expect to primarily get the ideas for blog topics from the periods of diffuse thinking in my life. The times when I intensely focused may result in some blog posts but generally when I am focused the goal and outcome are not to create a blog post. The blog is a great outlet for the thoughts from my diffuse thinking, allowing me to more fully explore such ideas.

As I begin to explore ideas for a post I will need to practice recall which will help me to better remember the topics in my recent learning. Recalling the various aspects for a post and attempting to organize them into a coherent whole will assist me in forming mental chunks which are the basis of so much learning.

Lastly sending my ideas out to the world is not something to be done without first testing and validating the thoughts. Self testing of an idea or topic being learned is an important learning skill.