Yesterday the Communications Assistant for the Faculty of Arts emailed me about featuring my blog on Artswire. She asked me why I blog. It was a great question that got me thinking about my initial motivations and how they’ve changed over the past couple of years. Here was my reply:
I blog for two reasons. First (and this was my initial motivation), I blog for professional development. It gives me a space to record my thought processes around teaching and learning, as well as document some artifacts of my teaching activities (e.g., syllabi, evaluations). Second, I blog to give my students a glimpse into my thinking and to expose me as–gasp!–a real human person. This came second only because I didn’t expect students to actually read it! After they started responding I realized I could harness this tool for this purpose.
I tweet (@cdrawn) for the same two reasons, but their order is switched. I started tweeting to share snippets of my thoughts and activities with interested students, and have ended up with some great professional networking in the teaching & learning community both @ubc and broadly.
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