EASY DOES IT Barbara Ganley, near her home in Weybridge, Vt., thinks of blogging as a meditative art form. Photo by Caleb Kenna.

Some of us here at the Institute recently had the tremendous pleasure of sitting and chatting with Barbara Ganley, prolific blogger, educator, photographer, champion of social media for teaching and learning, and a great source of inspiration for the various and sundry edupunks we’ve been hanging around with lately. Barbara, who was recently profiled in the New York Times, is well known in the blogosphere as one of the voices that comprise the “slow blogging” movement. Like other slow bloggers, she uses her blog as a means of facilitating meditation and reflection rather than of delivering reportage. She writes long, thoughtful, meditative and sometimes infrequent posts that read more like artful reflective essays than typical, concise, rapid-fire blog posts.

An early adopter of online writing tools for pedagogical purposes, Barbara first used blogs in the classroom in the dark days of 2001 — coincidentally, on September 11 when students suddenly had the unfathomable to reflect upon. Since then, she has explored ways of employing blogs and other social media for a myriad pedagogical uses (both in and out of the world of academe)  and offers a tremendous wealth of ideas on realizing their exciting promise for teaching and learning. Having left the academy after almost 20 years, Barabara recently founded Digital Explorations, a non-profit organization that explores the impact social media and digital story-telling tools can have on rural communities.

We learned a ton from chatting with Barbara and hope to find another occasion to do it again.

By the way, the way we arranged for Barbara’s visit to the Institute is a great illustration of her now famous aphorism, “Blog to reflect, Tweet to connect.” Barbara had indicated via Twitter that she was heading  to NYC. I tweeted right back inviting her to come see us here at Baruch, she accepted, and there you have it.

Thanks, Barbara, for paying us a visit. Let’s work together soon.