How I Blog – Kasper Spiro

At this year’s DevLearn, we’re putting a spotlight on the power of blogging for learning via the DevLearn Bloggers program. We’ve invited members of the DevLearn Bloggers team to write a post exploring how they approach blogging, and how it enhances their personal learning.

In this post we hear from Kasper Spiro, CEO of easygenerator, whose blogging of mindmaps and session reflections are a great resource to extend the value of conference learning.

I’m now blogging for almost 6 years, I do that at KasperSpiro.com and at our Easygenerator company blog. The initial reason to start the blog in 2009 was to improve my English. You can of course still tell that I’m not a native speaker (and writer) but writing the posts did help to improve my English.

The reason I still blog is also quit selfish Blogging is a big part of my learning process and my memory. By writing about certain topics, books, conference sessions or interesting developments I have to process that information in a different way and will memorize it much better. And if I do forget, I can always search my blog for it. I’m pretty sure I’m the most the most frequent reader of my blog.

Devlearn and other conferences

I use my blog in preparation of the conference (writing a preview) and I always write an evaluation post in the end. During conferences like DevLearn you will be flooded with new and interesting information in every session. But the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve will do its work, so I will forget 90% within hours. Therefore I make notes at each session. I used to make text notes that I worked into blogs (I started doing this in 2010). Later I discovered a great app (MindNode) that allows me to make these notes in the form of a Mind Map during the session and post them directly at the end of the session. I love that.

The result will look something like this:

Another advantage of Mind Maps is that I can organize my notes in my own structure, making it much more accessible for me. So it turns out I blog mostly for myself, but in the past years more and more people started reading the posts, which is great. It is also a very nice way to share your knowledge in the community. And speaking about sharing I’m planning to attend DevLearn and I’m planning to write posts on all the sessions I visit. I will also present a session (on learning maps).

Feel free to check out my posts on DevLearn 2014. On my blog you will also find conference reports on other great eLearning Guild conferences, like Learning Solutions, The Learning and Performance Ecosystem Conference and mLearnCon.