Category Archives: blogging

What Does It Mean to Succeed at Blogging?

blogging, community

Back at the desk after a holiday break that included lots of crocheting, binge watching and then a lovely visit with old friends. The snow storm sent me home a day early and we have been settled in our den for the past three days, warmed by the wood burning stove and watching football and the birds.

I browsed my RSS feed this morning and got stuck on this post from Tim Stahmer about the importance of independent blogging.  In blogging years, I’m very late in replying to his post, but that’s one of the barriers I face in my blogging practice so I’m not going to let the fact that my reply is a month late stand in my way of publishing this post.

That sense of immediacy is just one of my personal barriers to blogging. The other is the pressure to say something profound, and that’s obviously a bigger hurdle to tackle. What can I add to the conversations around me? What insights do I bring from my own experiences? I think I set the profundity bar too high. Better to just write it and send it out there sometimes. A simple share with a brief comment highlighting an important point or idea can spark a conversation as well as a long read.

For instance, I can highly recommend listening to How Silicon Valley Can Help You Get Unstuck from the Hidden Brain podcast. It focuses on applying design thinking to your own life, featuring the work of Burnett and Evans. I was fascinated with the idea of prototyping your life, particularly the idea that failure is to be expected, maybe even welcome. That isn’t the message we send our students, outside of a makerspace perhaps.

The title of this post also came out of the podcast. I have blogged on and off for a very long time in various spaces. Right now, I have two “active” blogs but do not have any schedule or plan for updating them so they are pretty sporadic. Am I failing at blogging? If not, I live at the very fringes of success. Completely failing would be to give it up and since I’m not ready to do that, I need to identify and pursue some definition of success that makes me feel less like a failure, I suppose.

I’m not ready to give it up because I agree with Tim that blogging continues to be a powerful way to share our stories and ideas. Getting beyond our personal barriers is an important first step in beginning a blogging practice. And, like any routine, it needs to become part of our schedule. Some people benefit from a good challenge: Jon Becker, for instance, is moving right along with his own Tweet of the Day blog entries.  This all help generate content.

From there, as Tim points out, the community becomes essential:

We also need to help each other build an audience and build communities around those educators who are willing to share in the open. And, on the other end, to teach our colleagues, parents, and even students why reading blogs is important, where to find the good ones, and how to easily build them into their routines (RSS still lives!).

And that is the biggest barrier of all. I wonder if a blogging challenge tied to a tweet chat would be a good start. It gets some content generated around a similar topic and as part of an already existing community.  There is always plenty more to say after a tweet chat.

 

Summer Reading List

blogging, books, reading

I really did not plan to blog every day in July, but I got a good start and then discovered the Big Time Blogging Challenge 2016 at the Big Time Literacy blog written by literacy coach Michelle Brezek. I may not always follow her theme for the day but since I just wrote up my reading list, I can follow right along today!

My list is varied: fiction, non-fiction and professional:

I’ll start with what I’ve already read since the beginning of July: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. A classic adventure story with a conflict between good and evil at the heart of the story. The heroine is a 12-year-old girl who discovers her own magic and, with the support of friends and family, saves the day.

I’m a LibraryThing member and am doing a couple challenges. John Steinbeck is the focus of the American Author challenge for July, and I’ll be reading East of Eden and Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, a series of short daily letters the Steinbeck wrote to his editor each day as he wrote the novel. Current events are the focus of the July non-fiction challenge, and I’m doing two books that are part of the One Richmond, One Book initiative at the University of Richmond where I serve as an adjunct professor. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stephenson was last year’s book. This year, it’s Evicted:   Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.

As I prepare for a keynote and workshop about blended learning in early August, I’ll be finishing Go Blended!: A Handbook for Blended Technology in School by Liz Arney and Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools by Michael Horn. The school district I’m working with loaned me a few books they’ve read in past years including The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation by Elena Aguilar.

I’ve been moving VERY slowly through a biography of Marjorie Harris Carr, wife of Archie Carr, the man who started the sea turtle conservation program. Marjorie was an environmentalist in her own right but struggled with the bias against women in science.

Also on the list:

And, I have two boxes of books coming to me that I shipped home from Denver. I can’t list all those titles but I suspect I’ll work a few in.

And…I forgot…I did a digital checkout of The Cracked Spine: A Scottish Bookshop Mystery that is waiting on my Kindle.

Thinking Out Loud

blogging, 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.

 

Getting Serious About Goals in 2016

adult learning, blogging, books, reading

I feel like I drifted a bit professionally through 2015. Was it because I didn’t have any written resolutions about blogging, reading or being more active in social media? I think they were my hazy goals last year but without making any kind of action plan, they fell a bit by the wayside. I was a pleasantly surprised to count up 33 blog posts on this blog although fall 2015 has been a dry season.

Blogging more consistently is a major goal for 2016: at least twice a week here and once a week on my reading blog at In One Place. The action plan for finding blog fodder includes more professional reading and sharing. I encourage my students to establish routines around reading and sharing and am challenging myself to do that this year.

I’ve been loving reading other writers’ reflections on their year and their ideas for the coming year. I’m glad to know from Martin Weller that blogging isn’t dead. I want to move further out of my comfort zone along with Tamara Letter, work through Jen Orr’s list of her open tabs, and “do something” with Pernille Ripp.  The first thing I’m doing is joining in Pernille’s Passionate Learners Book Club. I know I am not the main audience for her book but I think it’s essential that those of us who work with educators model the kinds of ideas she writes about. For instance, my “non grading” practice has opened some really important discussions with the teachers I work with and I really enjoyed the conversation I had with other professors during VCU’s #ALTFest.

It wasn’t like I didn’t accomplish a few things, mostly around my areas of work. I developed and taught two new courses for University of Richmond and rediscovered the joy of working and learning face to face after several years of teaching exclusively online. I helped VSTE expand its offerings and its audience so it is now truly a year round professional development provider. I read 97 books, 22 more than my initial goal of 75. Admittedly, many of them were fluff, but I had fun with some old and new authors.  I’m going to set a goal of 75 books again this year, making sure to include professional books. I bought three new ones during Dean Shareski‘s keynote at the conference (The Wondering Brain, Writing on the Wall, and A New Culture of Learning.) I’ll write about this reading here while I muse on my personal reading over at In One Place. If you’re interested, I’ve written my top five books of 2015 post to kick off 2016.

One last new routine: I love looking at Tom Woodward’s weekly web harvest that gets posted via Diigo. I’ve had it set up for awhile but never seem to remember to use the tag that would kick off the blog post. I’ve got it ready to go for this week: I tagged the various sites I used for this blog post as well as a few others about blogging in general. I think the post should happen on Sundays.

Getting Back In the Saddle

blogging

Two days have gone by without a 28 days of writing post. I could just walk away but my goal isn’t necessarily to blog every day, but get in a blogging habit. So, this is my chance to try again.

Dean Shareski’s blogging anniversary post was kind of what prompted me not to quit. He has a great clip from Seth Godin about the act of blogging that’s worth a view. Like Dean, I am writing for myself, a place to reflect, to clarify, to understand. I don’t completely ignore the audience since it is a public piece of writing and I try to make some wider connections to help them do their own thinking.

So, what happened the last two days? I could say “life” but the bigger problem is not having a routine for the blogging. It goes on the to do list but since it doesn’t have to be done, it tends to get pushed to the edges of the day and by 8:30 PM at night, I’m tired and uninspired. I would find myself listlessly surfing Feedly to find something to write about besides reading and books, the topic of several of the recent posts.*

Two lessons here:

1. Routines are important for me and blogging needs to find its place. Mornings seem to be the best time for me. And, I really want to be commenting on other blog posts so that will also be the time to great the day via social media and Feedly. It’s a bit ironic: I only recently gave up my morning pages habit of more than a decade. The long form stream of consciousness writing had grown stale. So, it should be easy to replace that with a blog entry. But, I’ve gotten used to doing other things, mostly reading or piddling on the Internet.

2. I need to get more serious about developing a parking lot for ideas. I have saved a few articles to Evernote but am thinking that a few minutes in the afternoon to just brainstorm things that have happened that day that might be worthy of comment along with emails or articles that have come my way would help prime the pump for the morning sessions so I can get right to the writing without heading out to the network for ideas.

I don’t think I’m going to try to get caught up. Just get started on the routine: I’m blogging in the morning and then this afternoon, I’ll curl up with Feedly and Twitter and think about tomorrow.

*I don’t think those posts are bad but they aren’t really the focus of this blog, which is supposed to be more about education and technology. I blog about my reading at my personal blog.