Thinking Out Loud

I was glad to talk with Tom Woodward recently. We talked about blogging, and he is right on about the reasons people say they want to blog and yet don’t:

You’ll have the usual pattern that varies somewhere between not knowing what to say, not having anything worth saying etc. The end result is that people don’t write. If you talk to them they’ll have a million things that would be interesting to read and that would be “worth” sharing…It feels mainly like it’s a holdover from time in formal education. Writing ends up becoming something done for an omniscient expert who will pass judgement on thee. It happens to me at times- both time limits and wondering if there’s any audience or purpose to what I’m writing.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another since 2003. My “personal” blog dates back to 2004 and my “professional” blog  to May 2006 when I set it up for an independent study project at William and Mary. At one point these two blogs were just one but as Tom suggests, I didn’t want to bother professional colleagues with my personal reading habits and hobbies so I split them.

But there are long stretches when I don’t blog. I think I’m in the not sure I have anything worth saying camp but there’s also a sense of worry about pleasing the powers that be. I’m not sure how my voice will resonate in what can sometimes be an ed tech echo chamber.

This year, I’ve been trying to blog three times a week: one at In One Place and two at In Another Place. I’ve been doing okay. There were three weeks of silence as I prepared for a vacation, took vacation and then recovered from vacation. Routines were out of whack and blogging fell off the weekly to do list. Now that I’m back, I think I’m going to put less pressure on myself. I want this blog to be about, as the title says, thinking out loud about the wicked problems that we face as we think about the present and future of education.

What does that mean? Shorter posts with brief commentary, not feeling like I have to do a full literature review before pressing publish, and honoring my nearly 30 year perspective of how digital technologies have impacted both living and teaching.

 

2 thoughts on “Thinking Out Loud

  1. It does, indeed! You become afraid to say anything if you don’t have at least one source.

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