A New Philosophy of Blogging

"Rodin's Thinker" by steven n fettig, on flickr

As mentioned a while ago, I’ve been giving some thought to a redesign – both in terms of the appearance/layout of the blog and the thinking behind why I’m doing this. If you’ve visited the site recently, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve hit the appearance/layout redesign and I’m pretty happy with it.
As for the philosophical thought process, I’ve given a lot of thought to how and why I do what I do on this blog. I thought it would be a good time to share my thought processes.

Why do I blog?

This was the starting point for me in redesign. Initially, I think it was purely to get involved in the onlne conversation and try to put in my two bits. Last year, I learned about RSS feeds and started subscribing to blogs, but I felt like I couldn’t share my side of the conversation. Essentially, it was a way for me to make my voice heard. Blogging was a chance to use technology, assess its value, and share information. As I have done so, I’ve become convinced of the power of blogging – the empowerment of having a voice, the encouragement of being heard, and the value of online PLCs.

As I’ve continued to blog, I think my purpose for doing so has evolved. At this point in my blogging life, I think there are three purposes for maintaining this blog:

1. To ask questions and seek feedback regarding teaching, technology, and/or education in general.
2. To share stories, links, and other resources that might benefit other educators.

How Do I Blog?

In rethinking what I do here at Edumacation, this was a more difficult question for me to ponder. When looking initially at successful blogs and “blogging tips” websites, there one consistent message that I heard: posting frequently is vital. In fact, I believed this to such a degree that I wore myself down trying to post at least a couple of times a week. Amidst planning, grading, coaching, mentoring, and everything else I had on my plate, I was forcing myself to crank out good content every couple of days.

As I’ve read more and written more, however, I have come to one significant realization: posting frequently is not a necessity. Very simply, it’s the old adage of “quality over quantity” that makes a blog successful. As an exemplar of this, I point to one of my favorite blogs to read – Smart Football. At times, I get very frustrated with this blog – Chris, the blogger, posts fantastic content, but posts are infrequent and sometimes sporadic. But here’s the thing: I am almost craving his next post, simply because all of his other posts are of such high quality. I find myself checking my reader regularly, hoping that his next post will be up. The quality of his posts become far more important to me than the quantity. Does this mean I post once a month? I certainly hope not. I think, as a practical goal, I want to post at least once a week. But it makes sense to me that, if I don’t have any good resources to share or questions to ask, posting for the sake of posting seems silly.

The Upshot

This seems pretty simple to me – write fewer, higher quality posts. In my mind, “high quality” posts are those that meet one or both of my purposes for blogging (see above), particularly #2 – sharing resources that benefit educators. It is with this in mind that I am going to be posting less frequently, but focusing my efforts on bigger “project” posts. An example would be this post – something I spend a couple of hours composing and refining. Another example is a resource page and corresponding post I am working on (something for all the busy teachers out there to look forward to).

So there you have it – a little explanation of what you’ll be seeing here at Edumacation for the forseeable future. If you have suggestions or would like to see something, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment – I’ll be sure to respond to everyone’s comments. Thanks for reading.

Redesign and Refocus

I’ve been noticing as I try to incorporate more visual components to this blog that the theme I’ve chosen simply does not lend itself well to doing so. The space allowed for text and images is just too small. Because of this, I’ve decided to begin a complete redesign of this blog, beginning with the theme and eventually working my way to refocusing the content itself. So if the site looks a little weird over the next week or two, there’s a reason. Hopefully the result will be a better experience for all those who visit and/or subscribe to this blog.

As I considered doing this, I realized how similar this idea is to what we are currently undertaking in our department – a fairly complete redesign and documentation of our curriculum. In fact, we’ve completely abandoned three of the units we’ve done the last two years and are designing new units for next year based around the habits of mind and completely integrating technology. Hopefully the result of this redesign and refocusing in our curriculum will create a better learning experience for all those who are stuck in our classrooms.

Tech Conference Day 1

Just finished up with the seminar portion of our first day.

In the first session, I attended a seminar on Creative Design – making documents more attractive and professional. It was a nice combination of the technology portion (different features in Word) and art/visual theory (where to locate important information on a page, for example). Very cool seminar that I’m already implementing in my documents for next year.

The second seminar I attended was on a fantastic program – Inspiration. I hadn’t really played with this program at all, though it’s been on my laptop since I got it in the fall. I have to say – it’s awesome. Essentially, it’s a tool for diagramming ideas – “making thinking visual” as the presenter said. It uses features that are just beautifully integrated – a visual/graphic organizer, an outline, various word processing tools, drawing tools, clip art, etc. As we were walking through the program, it was hard not to think of all the different potential uses in my classroom – outlining essays, constructing arguments, analyzing poetry, interpreting literature. Definitely a potentially exciting program.

Right now, we’re in perhaps the most exciting part of the conference – the collaborative planning time. Unfortunately, my department-mates aren’t here, so it’s pretty much my own implementation time. Even so, it’s paid (clock hours) time to work on putting our learning into action. I love this district.