Lots left to learn after a year of learning

My Sunday column:

As a young adult, I had this misguided notion that someday I would move from learning to knowing.

Haven’t reached that day yet.

As the calendar turns from one year to the next, many of us savor the year past and wonder what the year ahead might hold. As I look back on 2008 and ahead to 2009, I am pleased with what I have learned and excited by what I still need to learn.

In my sixth decade of life, I learned more in 2008 than I can remember learning in a single year since my youth.

I had spent more than a dozen years living in Iowa, but still I learned a lot about my new community, Cedar Rapids, and the surrounding area: places to shop and dine, places to shop and dine if and when they rebuild and reopen, interesting pieces of history, interesting points of contention, interesting people.

I had covered floods and other disasters before, but still I learned a lot about the destructive power of water, the resilient power of people, the generosity of people, the bureaucracy of disaster relief. (Many of my staff, who covered the floods and recovery first-hand, learned much more than I did, working mostly from the newsroom.)

I had been using databases for more than a decade, but still I learned a great deal about how communication companies can use interactive databases to shape a prosperous future. I shared my research with colleagues in a Newspaper Next report published by the American Press Institute: “Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue.” Our iowafloodstories.com database showed that our staff is learning how to use this important tool.

I had been studying and teaching about multimedia storytelling for a few years, but most of my work was based on academic research while I was at API, showing off examples of other people’s work and not really knowing how it came together. In 2008, I learned a great deal as I watched my staff use these tools to cover the flood and other stories. I even worked on one video-based story myself.

Similarly, I had watched the development of liveblogging as a storytelling form, encouraging other journalists to give it a try. When I became editor at The Gazette and GazetteOnline, I learned firsthand how liveblogging works when I pushed our staff to liveblog sports events and news events and hosted a few live chats myself.

I had dipped my toe into the social-networking waters before 2008 began, using Flickr to share photos of my travels and family gatherings, connecting with some colleagues through LinkedIn and starting to use Facebook and Delicious. I thought that was a pretty good start at learning a new aspect of the digital world, but each of those social networks was fairly comfortable and mimicked things I was already doing. In 2008, I truly began to understand social networking when I ventured into Twitter, a microblogging platform that I didn’t understand at all when I started. Nonetheless, I stuck with it and became pretty good at it. Now I use it daily to communicate with hundreds of people (and to learn a lot about my community, my industry, my colleagues and even my family).

I learned a lot more in 2008 about gadgets (BlackBerry, Wii), about interesting places I visited (Saudi Arabia, Ecuador), about myself and my family.

Most of all, I relearned that you never stop learning, or at least that life is more interesting when you are learning.

I have lots more to learn in 2009. I have just started dabbling in some other social-networking tools: Ning, Dopplr, TripIt, Yammer. Maybe I will spend enough time in 2009 to master one as useful as I’ve found Twitter. Maybe I will take the time to learn all that my new iPhone can do.

I know I will learn more than I can imagine now as my colleagues and I develop, adopt and adapt a new organization and new processes for separately producing content and products.

And some of this year’s lessons aren’t even visible yet, hiding around the next corner or the one after that. I hope I never reach that day when I move past learning to knowing.

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