Weblogs
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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…
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Blogs are back baby
There’s an adage that goes something like if you stay still long enough, you’ll come back into fashion. I think that time is coming for blogs. And if it isn’t I’m going to pretend it is anyway. My rather vague reasoning for this is based on the following thoughts. These are not researched, just my impressions and I’m very aware that in social media impressions can vary wildly. Twitter is a mess. The trolls are back in, it’s run by a temperamental man-baby, they are talking about changing the free nature, there are technical issues and doubts about its long term viability. Even if all this pans out, a certain…
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15 Years of Edtechie
via GIPHY (It was nice of Taylor to write a song about 15 years of blogging) I started this week writing about how I felt the need to STFU, and have blogged every day since, so erm, feel free to pretend I didn’t post this. It was the 15th anniversary of this blog back in May but I was too busy to mark it. I blogged the 10 year anniversary, so why not the 15th (it’s good enough for the Bava after all)? I’m not sure I have more to say on the role of blogging and academia that hasn’t already been covered. But what I have been aware of,…
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The art of STFU
I’ve not blogged for quite a while. Partly that’s workload, partly an impact of relentless tiredness, but also partly a sense of not feeling I have much to contribute. This post really is not a plea for you to say “no Martin, please keep blogging” (I probably will we all know that), but rather a repositioning of how one sees oneself when you reach a certain age (and particularly if you’re a white guy). You can call to mind your favourite “has an opinion on everything” ageing male ed tech blogger/speaker/commentator for this (it might be me). It seems that whatever people publish or do, there they are, letting you…
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Blog review 2020
At the end of last year I wondered if I was losing my blogging mojo. I had a plan to try and kick start it in 2020 with a 25 Years of OU series, reflecting on my 25th Year of working at the Open University. I completed this just in time for the end of the year. It was ludicrously self-indulgent and of little interest to anyone else, but now that’s it complete I am fond of it as a record of my own career at one institution. But, like everything else, my blogging plans were interrupted by Covid. When the implications of the pandemic became apparent for higher education,…
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25 Years of OU: 2004 – blogging
I didn’t start this blog until 2006, but it was my 3rd attempt at blogging. About 2004 I had seen Tony Hirst and John Naughton making good use of blogging, and I followed a lot of the nascent Northern Voice crowd. I attempted using Blogger, then a hosted WP site before I set up on Typepad (and then migrated to Reclaim Hosting a few years later). I’ve blogged about blogging a LOT, it is the default topic for bloggers when you run out of interesting things to say, so I won’t repeat the stuff about identity and digital scholarship here (I love that the tag I used for this initially…
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2019 blog review
via GIPHY Warning: Blogging as therapy session follows I usually end the year with a review of my own year on blogging. Not a review of ed tech blogging as a whole and the themes of the year, but just me. And in that is something of my current identity doubts with my own blog. This is my 44th post of the year, down on my usual 50 or so, which hints at that questioning also. The thing I’ve been struggling with is that a lot of the bloggers I admire have effectively become very good ed tech journalists, writing very well researched, thoughtful essays. These are excellent, but working…
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Want to be a paperback writer
I’d been pondering recently that when I was young, my sole ambition was to be a writer. My fifth book is about to be published, I blog, I write course material, produce reports and publish papers. Writing is pretty much all I do, and yet I would never describe myself as a ‘writer’ if someone asked what I did. Partly it’s because when I had in mind being a writer I dreamt of fiction, not ed tech books no-one reads. And also making my living from those books. But ambition is a peculiar beast, you get what you desire but don’t recognise it sometimes. I’ve managed to carve out a…
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The 1000th Ed Techie post!
This is the 1000th post on the Ed Techie blog. It took me over twelve years to get here, so I don’t think I’ll qualify as prolific. Steady, that’s the word. When I started, we still called them weblogs, Queen Victoria sniffed that they would never last, and they were put online by Cockney chimney sweeps, so let us now be all smug that it’s still here. I’ve blogged about blogging many times (it’s a blogger’s favourite subject), but it’s fitting on this auspicious occasion to reflect on what I’ve learnt, or come to believe, about blogging and its role in ed tech. So while we crack open the champagne,…
