Weblogs
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Cashback – My blogging year
2018 feels like the year that my blogging had been the apprenticeship for, with the OU crisis at the fore. My most popular post by some way was this one posted the day our VC resigned. It followed on from a semi-viral Twitter rant and subsequent post a couple of weeks earlier. Prior to this life had not been good at the OU, and like anyone sensible who worked there, I began to cast around for opportunities elsewhere. It wasn’t a healthy place to be. But through these posts, and Twitter a new sense of camaraderie emerged with colleagues, students, associate lecturers and wider community. Having a well read blog…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs
Whatever happened to blogs eh? What kind of poor, deluded, stuck in the past has-been would still keep a blog? In my 25 Years of EdTech series we’re now at 2003. Elearning is A Serious Thing, with standards, platforms, policies and strategies. Blogging developed alongside these more education specific developments, and was then co-opted into ed tech. In this it foreshadowed much of the web 2.0 developments, which it is often bundled in with. Blogging was really just a very obvious extension of the web. Once anyone could publish, they would inevitably start to publish diaries. This speaks more to the immutability of human communication than new technology – give…
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2017 blog review
This is not an edtech review of the year (why do that, when Audrey does it better than anyone?), but rather a review of my own blogging over the year. First up, some stats: Number of posts: 50 (including this one) Comments: 202 (including ones from me) Visitors: 231,081 Visits: 2,123,507 (mainly bots plus me) I try to blog on average about once a week, so maintained that pretty well. I don’t have a strict policy on this (eg, blogging every Thursday afternoon or something), but the rough goal does prompt me to blog on occasion when I feel there’s been a gap. And in the way of the unpredictability…
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Break my arms around the one I love
I’ve written before about my love of blogging. But post-Trump victory, I’m questioning everything. On the plus side it has seen a flurry of great blogging. With news forced to normalise it, and fake news a testimony to our ability to drown in comfort rather than face truths, blogs are the place to turn to for informative comment often. But on the downside, as David Kernohan points out, much of the grinding engine of paranoia and hatred is driven by these same tools and approaches. The ones I’ve happily championed for years. And more fundamentally I think we have to question the role of education, educational technology and educators now.…
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What if OER was blogging?
I work a lot in OER, and I do a lot of blogging, and I often blog about OER. But I don’t blog as OER. In this post I’m going to compare two things that are completely different – OER repositories and blogs – and so you can’t make any valid comparisons. But that’s the point of the post really, to see if there is a different way of looking at a topic. I’ve been looking at the stats for various repositories recently, both OA publishing ones, and OER ones. Thanks to David Kernohan for pointing me at JISC’s IRUS service, which provides a breakdown of publication repositories from UK…
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Dear reader, I blogged it
A couple of posts coming up about every blogger’s two favourite subjects: themselves and blogs. Since moving to Reclaim Hosting (slogan: We put the host in hosting) I’ve started creating blogs willy nilly. Partly this is because I can, and it’s a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon when you live on your own and have no friends when it’s raining. But I think it also reflects that I have a number of discrete interests now that qualify for blogs of their own. It started when Blipfoto, where I posted my photo a day, began having financial difficulties. I didn’t like the thought of losing that three year…
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Revisiting my own (blog) past
Here’s a fun thing to try if you’ve been blogging for a while (Warning: may not actually be fun). Get a random date from when you started blogging until present (eg using this random date generator), find the post nearest that date and revisit it. The date I got was 27th October 2010 (remember those crazy days?). Luckily I had a post on that very date: An unbundled publishing business proposal. In revisiting it I set myself four questions: 1) What, if anything, is still relevant? 2) What has changed? 3) Does this reveal anything more generally about my discipline? 4) What is my personal reaction to it? Answering questions…
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10 years of Edtechie – the imposter gang
Today marks ten years of blogging here at edtechie. I had started a few blogs before, but this was the time I stayed with it. That ten years later I’m still doing an activity which is not part of my formal job description, is not recognised and is usually undertaken in my own time is a testament to the power of blogging in itself. But I’m not going to make this a ’10 reasons why you should blog’ post. I was struck by a comment Sava Singh made in her presentation at OER16 when she said that even complaining about how Twitter used to be better in the old days…
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The future of blogging is blogging
I need to learn to do a selfie face… Another of my annual goals was to write one blog post a week. Unlike the books and film challenge, I fell short with this one, with 48 posts (including this one, may do another one yet). But I definitely upped my blogging game this year. It had rather drifted the past couple of years, and making myself write a post a week got me back into the habit. And I relearnt all the things I had discovered in those early years of blogging, such as the small, incidental thoughts are worth getting out there, that once you’re in the habit it…
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New home
I’ve finally (after 8 years) moved from Typepad to WordPress, and even more importantly, my own domain. Blame Jim Groom, that guy just wears you down until you say yes. Have tried a new theme, expect I’ll mess around with it and also widgets. If you’re here from the old place and use an RSS reader (I know, who uses them now?) then the new feed is https://blog.edtechie.net/feed/ All you WordPress geeks out there can tell me what plug-ins I must have. Time to start annoying the neighbours.
