Having been on the instructing side of academia for a while, I know students all learn differently. It takes a lot of nerve to even write a personal account of what you are thinking about. Blogging takes that to another level.

One of the hardest things to learn in any subject is how to intelligently expresses and explain your beliefs. Keeping a journal, rewriting notes and blogging are all examples of the necessary practice needed to excel at communicating. Additionally, like most forms of practice, it builds confidence and character.

The added benefit I see in blogging comes not from the first post, but the active reflection on comments and learning to maturely respond to comments. This is why I encourage classes to work together in creating a private wiki of the knowledge they are learning in my courses. I find it builds a community around learning and encourages intelligent communication among peers.

Do the blogging and with your readers.

I would like to hear perspectives from others on this since I've not yet gotten around to trying it myself. I can't speak to the effectiveness as part of the learning process, but I've read that there are other reasons to blog about what you know besides just helping yourself learn. The reason that most comes to mind is to establish a professional web presence that you have full control over. Future employers will google you, and you want what they find to establish your credibility and knowledge of a field.

For this to work as intended, though, you need to probably write higher quality material less frequently than a 30 minute brain-dump exercise would allow. If I were just going to do a 30 minute brain dump, I'd write anonymously or just on my own computer. The internet doesn't forget, so I wouldn't be publishing garbled crap on a regular basis anywhere with my real name attached.

I maintain a private wiki on a domain that I own to host my meeting notes and class notes. It's not a perfect system, but it has been useful several times to be able to access my notes and their revision history from any internet-enabled device. If you want to get into an online writing habit but won't be producing stuff you want the world to see, many cheap webhosts have pretty painless automated wiki setup (usually equivalent in difficulty to deploying wordpress on your own domain).

I think it is matter of personality as well. Some people love when they can present their skills and love writing about their new knowledge. I tried to write my own blog, but I found out, that I don't like it. I like to study, to know something new, to practise it, to talk about it with colleges, but I don't like to write my blogs. It was just next MUST thing in my life, and that made me more hurry. If you enjoy writing, write. If not, don't do that and spend that time with something you like to do.

For revising I use Anki, there I have all the stuff which was new for me and I want to remember it. I think the internet article can make you more popular, or in the other hand, it can point on things you don't know properly. Writing about stuff you are good at, and you work with it longer time, is great, it can help another people. Revising stuffs from one day study (or one week study) is not complex, has less information value and is more prone to mistakes.

Blogging about what you're learning about is so completely useful. I've been doing it for a while, and here are some of the advantages I've come across:

• If you can get the right community to read your blog posts, you can get a lot of awesome feedback. They can point you to resources, and point out places where you may be fuzzy on the concept.
• It helps you clarify your thoughts, writing for an audience. Things you might not have looked over again are reviewed as you double check the content of your posts.
• You have a quick resource to turn to, should you ever need to look back over the contents of a class.
• It helps people who teach or write teaching materials to see where someone might be struggling.

If I had to choose, I would choose blogging over one more study session. My mind is more focused when I'm blogging. When I'm studying, if I'm tired, or distracted, or the material is boring, there's the risk that I'm not taking in anything extra.

It depends on how you define learning progress. If the goal is to learn something more deeply, writing about it does help. If you want to learn more things less well, skipping a reinforcing step makes sense.

I don't know if I would blog about something I just learned either. Depends on how good it would be.

I think you should try it and see the results for yourself - study yourself and know the things that work and the things that don't; and have fun with it.

Personally, I learn best when I add what I call the 'human element', which means that I need to talk with people about what I learn, share the knowledge and ask questions, that's why I love Stack Exchange (I'm still new to it though).

Now back to your question.

If you have readers to read and interact with you through the blog, I think it's a good idea, but it's not easy to have that, especially if you're just starting. - I also think that the blog is great when the topic is subjective enough so that people would have different ideas/thoughts to respond to your posts.

A private blog could be useful if you plan to go through your posts by the end of each week or something, you need to try it and see if it works for you. (if you decide to try that, I would recommend writing very short summaries, so that when you go back to your posts, you would try to recall the details instead of just reading them - this helps a lot)

I have heard this a lot, for example from Tony Robbins, that it is a good thing to be learning material as if you intend to teach it to someone else. You appear to obsorb material far better if you know you have to be teaching it to someone else.

If you see blogging about what you learned as a method to teach it to someone else, it could be very beneficial to you. You have to have a very deep understanding of the material if you want to teach it.

I find it very useful to set my mind straight before writing a large assignment. It trains you ability to structure and point out your "pearl of wisdom" more explicit. So in the end I think it will save you time in the long-term.

If I understand the question correctly, you want to know whether you should study the theory or put it into practice. Right?

Studying is important because you learn new stuff, you gain new perspectives, you learn from the mistakes of others...

With blogging: You practice creating value. Which I find really important. Right now you may feel like you aren't doing a good job. But if you keep persisting, it will pay off! You will form your own opinion about the stuff you learn, you'll think more critically and you'll learn to write for an audience.

So do both!

Just remember, A wise man is worth nothing if he doesn't provide value. Blogging can be your way of providing value.

Blogging about what you are learning is extremely useful if you want to understand the topic better. As it has been mentioned here already, explaining a topic in way that others can understand it forces you to understand it better.

But what if you are incorrect, and you publish false information about a topic? This is another advantage of blogging about it. Because your blog is public, there is potential for you to receive critique and instruction from someone who may know better.

Your blog is also valuable as a study journal of sorts. If you organize it well, you will be able to refer back to posts you've made and make valuable connections to future studies. Then you can document those in the blog posts and link posts together.

Yes. I found some unexpected consequences. By blogging about a topic I was learning, I found that my blog posts were being picked up on Google and that people would often correct me and offer new and more elegant solutions to the problems that I had solved.

Also, once or twice my blog entry became number one hit on Google for that topic and many people interested in that topic posted in the comments, almost forming a community around the blog entry.

Just writing down the topic will clarify it in your mind, but writing it in a blog entry will expose your efforts to public scrutiny. All good stuff.

Blogging about what you're learning is certainly a handy metric for measuring what (and to what degree) you have learned certain subjects, but I'm not sure blogging daily before bed is the best method of doing so. You may find you have an easier time writing earlier in the day, before fatigue sets in.

If your blog only serves as a log for yourself then daily blogging could be useful to keep yourself accountable. However, if the purpose of the blog is also to explain a concept or concepts in relative detail to an actual audience, it may benefit you more to write less frequently so that your posts can be more extensive.

In fact, you could consider keeping two blogs- one private blog as a pure log of what you studied and any personal notes or questions about the material, and another public blog updated less frequently in which you aim to educate others and clarify your thinking.

Yes for me. Sometimes I blog about stuff to offload it to a place where I know I can get it later and I don't have to memorize it.

I do this and it helps to an extent. You won't remember every fix or detail you come across. Why not write them down? Not only are you leaving instructions for yourself if you ever need to come back to it, you are opening up the solution to the internet as well.