A weird thing happened to me a week ago. Someone at work wanted me to tell them how to blog. I blog internally at work, it actually just seems to be a natural extension of what I do in Education.

I have decided to document how much work I have done in my online social career. I have been doing this for several years. I was able to discover that my daughter’s middle school had to test her if asked them too by participating in an non-verbal learning disorders community back when she was in 8th grade (she is graduating from college this year, so that’s 8 years ago!). I used the web to keep researching what I could do for my daughter after they tested her and denied her services, even though she had a 20+ point split between her verbal and non-verbal IQ score. I will never forget, maybe never forgive, the principal at RAA middle school in Tallahassee Florida, although she pissed me off enough to send me into full-fledged research mode. For those of you who don’t know, my daughter was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. That principal was just wrong and should be taken to task for delaying services my daughter needed.

I helped rebuild the Native American Student Association at Florida State University, and then turn it into a Union, using a Yahoo Group. I was so good at rallying the troops that the VP of student affairs told me sternly that I didn’t need to turn everything into an email event (although that seemed to get the right people’s attention….).

When I graduated,  I was recruited to New England to work for a big high tech company, who laid me off after 11 months. I couldn’t understand it – they said there were no jobs, but there were tons of young asian (mostly) men reading books I had read in college. Why didn’t they let me have one of those spots? Then I heard Senator Kennedy say that he hadn’t heard how engineers had been affected adversely by outsourcing. I knew many, many people who were out of work because of the practice. So I started DisplacedTechies, and rounded up people to go to talk to Senator Kennedy. I am proud of what we did – focused peoples’ attention on the fact that techies on both sides of the outsourcing issue were being affected negatively. But this issue was (and continues to be) way bigger than I can even comprehend.  So I stopped keeping up with it, although the site remains up.

When the opportunity came up at work to blog, I grabbed it. Using social media to gather or share information is something I have done for 8 years. I have worked with some pretty hairy political issues, and learned lessons from that. So, when people ask me at work how to blog successfully, I think one thing I need to start saying is practice, practice, practice.