Continuing Education

This past Saturday was the second and final installment of a brief but interesting continuing education class I enrolled in through the local college. (It's not a community college anymore, yo- they've got bachelor's degrees now!) The class was about online writing, specifically blogging. I know what you are thinking- what more could the creator of this entrancing, engrossing web log possibly need to learn about blogging? Yeah, yeah, very funny.

The class was geared toward people who have a business or some other interest for which social networking (via blogging, tweeting, Facebook and the like) is an as-yet untapped opportunity. The instructor provided lots of ideas for how to make your blog more engaging, including such obvious yet oft-ignored advice as "update often." Apparently I should also be reviewing products, or books, or movies, staging contests with prizes, and conducting polls. (For the first contest, I am thinking about a wagering pool on how long we let our jack-o-lanterns moulder before we transfer their squishy persons into the yardwaste bin...)

The real reason I signed up for the class is that I have been fomenting an online writing project on a topic that interests me. I thought getting a little formal blog training (such as it is) would give me a confidence boost to get going already, since like many projects in my brain, this one has taken out a mortgage and moved into a solid little house in the idea phase. But what I learned, of course, made me not more confident, but markedly less so. Because social networking on the web, and knowledge networking, I guess, provides a staggering array of tools and sites and doodads you can use to make sure that your thoughts or your message or brand or whatever get OUT THERE! in a hundred different places and ways. So you can set up and write your blog, but no one is going to find it if you don't give it the right "Google juice," and get it stumbled upon or dugg or kirtsied or whatever.

OK, maybe these are just ways to encourage visits, not determine the life or death of your ideas. But still, there is a gravitas implied in the level of effort and technology to promote an idea (which ironically I would be perfectly willing to exert if I were helping my classmate get his building supply company's blog off the ground) that feels misplaced on some fun writing project I'm idly mulling over. Crap. Now I have to go back and read the Artist's Way all over again.

Speaking of education, we let the television educate our children a bit over the weekend, and we were all treated to an episode of "Dinosaur Train" that featured great green boulders of Brachiosaurus dung, feces, poop, and one other poop-phemism that escapes me. We were expecting more of a (snickering) reaction from Naomi, who is not immune to the refined toilet humor of the preschool set, but because she is a TV hothouse flower, I am never sure what she is even understanding when the shows are on.

Speaking of jokes, the knock-knock jokes are attempting to gain traction. The joke is a fascinating little neuroscience mini-project- little kids love to laugh, they love jokes, but they don't understand them, and they really don't understand how to tell them. (Of course, neither do I, I am terrible at joke telling.) It's amazing what mental abilities go into this genre of socializing. So Naomi can repeat jokes, but the ones she invents are more Dada than Catskills.

And speaking of more laughs to come, I am happy to discover lately that Muriel possesses the personality trait (which she didn't get from me) of being able to laugh heartily at herself. At dinner the other night she was holding her fork weirdly, upright by the tines on one hand, while doing some other engrossing thing with her other hand. She looked at her food, then said, hey, where's my fork?! When I told her it was in her hand, she looked at it, and back at me, and laughed and laughed.