WordPress is a user-friendly blogging platform that allows you to quickly and easily publish posts on whatever topic suits your fancy. Software enables you to include links, videos, music and other media to enhance your posts and allows you to edit layouts, formatting, themes and colors to fit your needs.
Blogs can be a very useful social learning tool, providing a space to share knowledge, opinions and insights into any topic that you choose. Learners and interested parties can subscribe to your blog to ensure they see all new content as it is created and comment sections allow for interaction and discussion around information shared.
One great aspect of WordPress and other blogs, is the ability to incorporate media from other sources. This requires a monetary subscription; but if signed up, the blogger can imbed resources like TedTalk videos, pictures and infographics from other sites and podcasts or sound clips to enhance and support their own posts.
Probably the most challenging aspect of using a blog for social learning is gaining attention and followers for your writing. With so many blogs being available on a limitless number of topics, a successful blogger would need to share their work and promote it within other learning communities centered on their topic.
For myself, in particular, I would like to create a blog focused on leadership and development within a retail/ retail pharmacy setting. My blog would share tips and tricks for recruiting for the talent pipeline, onboarding new members of leadership, training and developing this talent and grooming them for management positions. Using a blog format would allow me to create a searchable database of best practices and methods for development, performance management, engagement and creating a collaborative team. In addition, sharing stories of successes, challenges and humor anecdotes of life within retail leadership will help to establish relationships with my readers, and other potential industry leaders.
Using blogs as both a resource and a creative outlet for your knowledge and experience can be productive and rewarding once you are able to explore all of the functionality and different ways to gain credibility and attention.
Danielle's Social Learning Blog 