Metapic
I’m joining the DS106 Radio Summer Camp this week, and Jim Groom put out an invitation to all of us to join in a session today about blogging called “Blog or Die!” Why does blogging rule all media, as Jim asked? I thought I’d blog a few notes about blogging as prep for joining this session.
I seem incapable of writing blog posts under 2000 words, but for this one I’m really gonna try!
Benefits of blogging myself
I started blogging in 2006, after learning about WordPress and blogs from the amazing Brian Lamb (who was at the University of British Columbia at the time, but who is now doing fantastic work over at Thompson Rivers University). Funny enough, one of my first posts was called “Why blog?”. Coming around to the same theme I guess!
In reading over that post I find it still resonates with me eighteen years later. Benefits of blogging I wrote back then:
- Reflecting on teaching and learning so as to improve
- Sharing back with others, since I have learned so much from those who have shared their reflections
- Connecting with a community
- Thinking things out for oneself and being able to find those reflections fairly quickly later
Most of the value I have found in blogging since then still more or less falls into one or more of these buckets. For example:
- I’ve used the blog a lot to learn with other people and make connections in open online courses, which I did quite a few of from 2013-2016 or so (those years are a guess). You can see those posts under the categories at right under the main heading of “open online courses.” In some of those courses we used to carry on relatively lengthy conversations across blogs, through the magic of RSS feeds that would feed into a single course site to make finding each others’ blogs easy. I made a lot of connections to folks that way that continued beyond those courses because our blogs continued and we could keep connecting.
- I have frequently used my blog to take notes on and reflect on things I’m reading. So, for instance, I have a whole set of notes on peer feedback, which I researched while on sabbatical. Of course, I could have just done note-taking privately, but I think that sharing publicly could possibly be beneficial for others in inspiring them to learn more about a topic or read the works themselves. In one case one of the authors I wrote about found my posts about his work and I was able to meet him while we were spending a year in Australia, which was lovely.
- I started sharing my presentations at conferences and workshops on my blog (though I don’t think I’ve catalogued all of them). This has been useful for when I can’t remember if I shared those presentations on Slideshare, or Google Slides, or Speakerdeck, or some other platform. The idea is to collect them all here so I can find and share them easily. I’ve been able to link to these posts on my CV, which has been very handy.
- I’ve used the blog to think through abstract ideas like open pedagogy and open educational practices, by taking notes on what others have said and using the space to come up with my own ideas.
- I’ve used this space to reflect on student feedback on my courses, and my own reflections on how things went, under the category reflections on my own teaching.
- Having the blog be a place where a lot of my work and thinking is located has been helpful when other platforms come and go. I will admit I did a lot of blogging on Twitter that never made it here, and now I’m completely off Twitter. I remember putting a lot of effort into some Storify stories back during ETMOOC in 2013, only to have it fold not too long after. I spent even more time trying to re-create those stories here on the blog, which was a good lesson that I should have just done it here in the first place. If I spread my thoughts across multiple social and other sites and don’t collate them in once place it’s harder for me to find and reflect on them later.
- I collected all my work for DS106 on a specific blog, which was a great way to keep track of not only all the products, but the processes of making them, for future reference if I wanted to do something similar in the future.
In a way this space has been and continues to be a kind of portfolio of my thinking and work over the past 18 years, and counting.
Value in others’ blogging
These are values for me in my own blogging, but I also find it valuable when others do so. I learn a lot from others’ thoughts and reflections about teaching, and appreciate it when I can find those easily. RSS is great, and so are blogs where I can sign up via email to get notified of new posts.
Over the years, people have posted their thoughts on many different platforms: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now email newsletters are common. I suppose the latter can serve a similar function as a blog in some ways, but the continual pressure to sign into the various platforms to read is a (minor) annoyance.
Having to try to follow people on multiple platforms, finding the places they are and being there oneself, has become a much bigger annoyance, particularly after the demise of Twitter. Many folks are on Mastodon, but others are spread far and wide. Many are on LinkedIn and are “blogging” there, but even though I find some very useful posts there I also get annoyed because the algorithm only gives me some posts from folks I want to hear from, and in all kinds of weird order. I feel like I’m missing more than half the story. And that all the links open within LinkedIn itself? Don’t get me started on how many clicks it takes to get a URL to try to save later.
I get it, it’s easier to post on social media than to post on a blog and then post that on social media. And maybe it even leads people to engage more rather than clicking out of where they are. But it’s still frustrating trying to find that post you wanted to return to later amidst the algorithm cruddiness of all the other posts that came later (and the order that seems to change every time you open the damn app).
I also get that setting up and maintaining a blog is a fair bit of work. I am lucky in that my university has its own WordPress installation and blogging platform; not everyone is so lucky. If you’re in British Columbia, Open ETC does wonderful work providing WordPress and other platforms. Some folks work with a hosting provider like Reclaim Hosting (which is awesome) to set up their own domain and sites (including blogs), but doing that comes with a learning curve. Still, I’m excited about Reclaim Press, which looks to be offering hosting for WordPress sites at a very reasonable price!
Continued feeding
Running a blog takes care and feeding though, and I’ve let mine starve for years before. Just recently in fact, when I’ve felt myself overwhelmed with day-to-day work in recent years. Now that I’m on leave until December of this year I am blogging a lot more…will I keep it up later?
Only if I manage to not do 2000+ word posts each time, which take a lot of time! And I seem to have kept this one in check at around 1300 so hey, getting better.
