Today's post in my week-long series in support of ASTD Employee Learning Week is guest blogged by Christine Martell of VisualsSpeak. Christine is one of the few blog pals who I've also had the pleasure of meeting in the "real world," as she describes in her post.

In addition to being a very busy business woman, Christine is also a major driving force behind Blog Cascadia for her local ASTD chapter and and is  co-host of PodCascadia, a regular series of training/learning-related podcasts that I highly recommend.  _____________________________________________________________________________________

I met Michele through this blog. She has told part of the story, describing how we recently did a conference session together. Today I want to talk about another aspect of how we have learned from each other through our blogs.

I had been blogging for a couple of months when I first commented on this blog. I had tried commenting on a few others, but the bloggers didn’t really respond, maybe a thank you in the comment string. Michele not only responded in the comments, but she emailed me. She offered additional suggestions, and added to let her know how things went. It was the first time I learned that blogging could be a conversation. I have had websites for over 10 years, so my thinking was geared to a reality where you put things onto the internet and hardly ever knew who was attached to all those visitors that showed up in your stats every day.

When Michele put out a call for people to do the 31days to a better blog challenge with her, I responded. I originally started my blog to teach people about how to use the VisualsSpeak ImageSet, which is a visual tool created by my company. I thought the challenge would be a great way to not only learn how to blog better, but to meet other bloggers to learn from.

While the group connected around making our individual blogs better, we also started reading each others blogs. Through this process, I started to learn a lot about things I didn’t know before, but more importantly probably wouldn’t have sought out:

• Al Upton and the Minilegends, this is a class of 8 and 9 year olds in Australia. They created stories where you could interact and choose a variety of pathways using something called Voice Threads.

• Cammy Bean has an e-learning blog, and I have discovered a lot of other blogs through her links. She has also helped me see that not everything that is being said about young women and their relationship to games and technology is true across the board.

• Tim Davies  has taught me about Youth Participation, how blogs can be created on Drupal, and how useful one page overviews of web tools can be.

• Eklavya was our blogger from India. Not only did he bring a different cultural perspective, but he also brought stories about the people of his country which he mixed in with lots of great tips about Wordpress.

• Kate Foy showed me how engaging a heartfelt video message can be, as well as lots of tips and tricks for Macintosh and surviving conferences.

• Sue Hickton , the infamous Evil Sue, with analysis of organizational functioning and swimming with sharks.

• Alex Miller who showed us in a very short screencast how effective they can be, which also sparked the great Google Reader versus Netvibes debate.

• Frances McLean showed us all how to remain balanced and sane by creating the visible check.

• Kate Quinn scoped out the iPod Touch, and kept me up on the cool new Mac toys.

• Sue Waters Is it even possible to describe what one learns from Sue Waters? Using podcasts, wikis, every tool under the sun, mobile devices including things I’ve never heard of. Not to mention repeated attempts to help me “get” Twitter and Facebook. And her seemingly endless links to interesting learning professionals across the planet.

• Paul Watford showed us how much adding new blood to a project in the last week can keep the troops moving forward.

• Laura Whitehead continues to remind me of the importance of web accessibility, but also teaches me about the tools available and how to use them. Now I just have to utilize more of them.

Getting back to Michele, beyond the content of the 31 Days challenge, I learned quite a bit about her philosophy around workplace learning, informal learning, personal learning environments, as well as her integration of blogs and wikis as tools for non-profits. So, when I had an opportunity to do a conference presentation I not only knew she had the knowledge base, but that we had enough philosophical alignment to come together in a fairly short time to create content.

I was already doing two presentations at the conference plus I was exhibiting. My business partner often attends conferences with me to help with these things, but I saw the opportunity to use Michele instead, which would cover many of her expenses.

Here is the part I found pretty amazing, she was able to work in my booth and assist me in my sessions without any formal training. She had learned enough from reading my blog  how I ran my sessions and what I said about my products. She even knew it would be easier if I used a digital recorder, so she brought hers. She was able to anticipate my needs and back me up each step of the way. That has not always been my experience at these types of events.

So just through reading each others blogs we not only formed the personal relationship and trust that allowed us to work together, but we have learned about the content of what we each bring so we were able to successfully work together for three days face to face.

What kinds of informal learning do you get out of reading other’s blogs?