Weblogs
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20 Years of EdTechie
This month (May 2026), marks 20 years of blogging at edtechie.net. That is, by any measure, a long time to pursue one interest, or platform. In that time I have published 1,358 posts. At roughly 500 words per post, that’s a total of 679,000 words. That’s enough for a really turgid series of fantasy novels. Ironically the 20th anniversary arrives just as I’ve been on hiatus from blogging. There has been no particular reason for this, I didn’t make a grand decision to stop blogging. I just sort of ran out of things to say. Partly this is AI’s fault. It is the only game in town with regards to…
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Ghost in my machine
Now I am an acclaimed (only in my own head) fiction writer, I thought I’d set up a distinct blog for that identity. I’ve opted to try out using Ghost. I felt it would be a bit cheeky to host this with Reclaim as it’s not an academic site, so have opted for hosting with Ghost themselves. You can check it out at https://www.mwellerfiction.com/ Ghost is more of a newsletter-centric than blog-centric platform I feel, and I’m not sure I’ve quite shifted my perspective, or if I’m just carrying over the blogging habits developed over 20 years of EdTechie. We’ll see. I’m also not sure what the voice is on…
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French toast in a riot – 2025 review
Maren has done a reflective look back over the year, so I thought I’d chip in with one too. In my last post listing my favourite albums of the year, I riffed off the title of folk-punk artist Sunny War’s album (Armageddon in a Sunny Dress) to say it was like eating french toast in a riot. That can stand as a summary of my personal year – it’s been a freaking nightmare politically, socially and environmentally. I mean, when future historians (if there are any left) look back, they’ll be going “what the hell happened in 2025??”. But personally it’s been a very positive year. I feel slightly guilty…
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Meet me by the blog roll
I’m quite fascinated by shopping malls. They featured so strongly in American movies of my youth, then the shopping centre spread to the UK, followed by their decline and the advent of bleak, but strangely beautiful ruin porn. To that end, I read Alexandra Lange’s history of the mall, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall recently. It’s a fascinating account of the initial drivers for the mall, their rise, decline and subsequent reinvention. It may not be an obvious connection, but probably because I blogged about it recently, it got me thinking about parallels with the (educational) blogosphere. First up, let’s acknowledge that there are…
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For a short while…
I did a short blog series a while back, about things I was wrong about. One of these, inevitably, was the democratisation of social media. I won’t rehash the reasons why I was wrong about it, but it came to mind again last week during an excellent talk by Bonnie Stewart on Reclaim TV. Bonnie set out her blogging journey, and how it played into her PhD and recent work at UHI. This made me recall the halcyon days of blogging and early social media. Given what has happened since it is tempting to dismiss this as naive foolishness, but I think that is to do discredit to our past…
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On blogging (again)
As part of Reclaim Hosting’s “On Writing” series, I had a chat with Jim Groom about my 20 years of blogging. You can see the recording here. Kudos to Jim for this series by the way, it’s fascinating to hear people like Kate Bowles talk about the role that writing plays in her life. In preparation for the chat, I tried to impose a series of phases on my blogging life. You can always slice these things different ways, but here is the one I came up with, which we talk about in the video: I also pondered what functions blogging has provided for me over the years. That’s not…
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What type of blog am I?
I took part in a Reclaim Hosting session as part of the blogging community yesterday. Maren ran the session on How to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back and Lee Skallerup Bessette gave a fascinating talk on her blogging history. One topic she raised was a thorny one that many of us have wrestled with in the blogging area. And that is, whether to have specialised blogs or an all-encompassing one. Lee talked about how she had established different blogs for swimming, knitting as well as ed tech. Jim Groom stated that he made a decision early on that his blog would be a big messy bucket for everything he was…
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Blogging is back, take 183
But is it safe? Maren and Jim over at Reclaim are starting a blogging community, so it feels like the 2000s again. Get a Northern Voice conference going in Canada someone, before it becomes part of the USA! I don’t really need encouragement to blog, but if you do, Maren has some advie on getting your blogging mojo back. I’m trying not to do that thing of linking everything to “current events”, but I do feel that having your own platform, your own voice, community and identity when so much of that is controlled by people you wouldn’t trust with a glue pen, does add extra currency to blogging. Brian…
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An online presence health check
In my earlier post I was trying to sell the idea that (higher ed related) blogging is experiencing a resurgence. This is partly a justification for myself (and to my line managers), because I’ve been on study leave for 2 weeks. Study leave basically means you have a reason to say no to about 50% of the usual meetings. I’ve been writing a research bid, but I’ve also been using that clearer space in the calendar to update my online presence. This has included: I’m not sure if any of these make much difference, but I would argue (vigorously even) that it is a good use of anyone’s time in…
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The newsletter as RSS
My post about blogging prompted some comments on RSS. I loved RSS, it seemed like magic, you could just pull stuff in from different places, subscribe easily, aggregate feeds. Your blog reader was a little daily newspaper of quality content. It was the essence of what the web was made for. I blame Twitter for killing this magic, increasingly people didn’t promote, or even know their RSS feeds, and social media became a much more effective way to distribute content. RSS often operated in the background still but you rarely saw the little RSS icon on people’s sites any more. Various RSS readers failed or were killed off, and the…
