I saw Reclaim Hosting was having some guest bloggers as an upcoming series, and the first one out of the gate was Lee discussing how ReadyWriting came to be. I’ve been thinking about that post on and off ever since. In part, I think it’s because Lee went pretty far back in her own journey with writing, which in turn made me think about my own journey building this wall.
I’m going to gloss over a period where I wrote a lot just for fun, and the creative writing courses I took in my teen years. I’m not really sure about how that did or did not influence my approach to blogging.
I had a computer in my home growing up, but it wasn’t until my undergrad days that the web became a place I thought I could participate in. Of course there were games (new grounds was all the rage), videos to watch, and even some forums I participated in (one dedicated to Mercury Cougars, my first car). But I hadn’t really considered being able to create a space for me. During my undergrad days, I started taking edtech courses (ecomm at the time). These included video production, office applications, and even some web stuff. One of my instructors included a blogging assignment, which I think is still relatively common in these types of classes. Looking back I’d say I didn’t really get it, and of course I just got the assignments done and moved on. Back then we used Blogger, as was the style at the time.
Following my teaching internship I had my last edtech class in undergrad. I don’t remember the name or the topics broadly, but I really remember the blogging assignment in that class. It was supposed to be a biweekly activity. Again we were shown how we could use Blogger (and I think WordPress.com) to complete the assignment, but it was a pretty open book in terms of topics. I don’t recall any specific prompts being given to us. I didn’t have many classes that term, so my struggle with blogging didn’t come from lack of time. But everytime I sat down to write the blinking cursor would just sit there, mocking me. After a few weeks of struggling to get even a single sentence down I met with my instructor for some advice. We talked about the struggles I was having coming back from internship and about the challenges I faced with this particular assignment. This instructor had taught me every edtech class I took up until that point, so they knew I did video stuff. He reached back into his filing cabinet and pulled out a Flipcam. He suggested I give this new vlogging thing a shot.
It helped a little bit. I usually parked like ten blocks from the university campus, so on my way back to my car after classes I grabbed the Flipcam turned it around, bad selfie style (as was the style at the time), and just talked. Upload the video to Blogger and voila, it’s a vlog. However, even with that help I don’t think I completed all of the blogging assignments and definitely didn’t stick with it. I put blogging down for a few years after that.
When I came back to the university, this time as a grad student focusing on edtech, guess what also came back into my life? That’s right, blogging. Some of the courses, with different instructors this time, had blogging components. These were a bit different; more structured purpose. One blog I started on Blogger was a media/edtech site where I wrote about what I was learning about multimedia design for learning. But I think the really formative ones happened in 2012.
In the year before, I spent some weeks travelling around the Baltic Sea, spending some time in Finland. I was there to visit some friends I’d met travelling, and also an Iron Maiden concert (because why see them in Canada when I could go to a Nordics tour?). I loved my time in Finland and kept in touch with those friends ever since. The following year, Finland was all the rage for their education system which surprised everyone apparently. The OECD’s PISA program noted they had ‘the best education system on earth’ at the time. Pasi Salberg wrote a best seller, Finnish Lessons, and the export of Finnish education ideas began. I was entering my second year of grad school when I learned about Helsinki Summer School (HSS), a series of courses hosted by the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. One of the programs was Designing Teacher Education for the Future (#detef2012). This course seemed like the perfect fit for me, and so I applied, and was accepted to join over 20 students (educators) from like 14 countries to learn about the Finnish education system.
What’s this got to do with blogging you might wonder? Well, HSS sent out an email a month or so before the programs began asking for “official bloggers” to come forward to write about their experiences during the program. They had small gift packages for the volunteer bloggers. By this point I’d had a few (failed) blogging attempts but for some reason felt compelled to try again. I signed up and because the hss-detef20212 blog on another Blogger site. In 2011, I discovered the delight of Finnish ice cream, so that summer of HSS blogging I made another blog, 21 days of ice cream, where I posted videos of me eating different flavours every day. The ice cream blog is lost to the sands of time, but I did reclaim the detef blog and brought it over to the blogwall some years ago (category Helsinki Summer School 2012).
I arrived at HSS, picked up my bloggers gift pack, and started my blogging journey once again. Not only did I write about what I learned in class, on school tours, and from the readings, but also of the social events and World Design Capital events going on at the time. It was truly a co-curricular thing where we didn’t talk about what I wrote in any of my class sessions, but there was a moment I was at the info desk about half way through the program and one of the staff said they really liked what/how I was blogging. A few of the other staff were in ear shot and had that moment of like, ‘oh that’s your work we’ve been reading’. I think that’s when it hit home for me. This wasn’t a group of people that had been assigned to comment on posts as part of a classroom assignment post-once-reply-twice style. Their words seemed genuine and made the work I was doing feel valuable, even though it wasn’t getting much in terms of comments.
After summer school ended blogging, for me, paused again. I might have kept up some posts on my media/edtech Blogger site from time to time. Some posts probably had a bit to do with #TvsZ. I think a lot of my ‘blogging’ ended up on Twitter in those mid 2010s years. I think a lot of my writing from those years is just gone now. Then, in 2016ish I learned Jim Groom was leaving higher ed to start up his own company with Tim Owens, Reclaim Hosting. The work these two did was something that interested and excited me about the field I came to work in. Seeing the announcement gave me the push I needed to really jump in. I signed up, spun up a wordpress site, and started a blog. But now that I didn’t have HSS to write about, and no prompts for a class, what the heck would I write about?
I started with writing about book clubs I was a part of, or courses I was taking (like Making Sense of Open Education). There was plenty of start and stop in the early years, and I moved the blog around a bit too I think. Changing themes, changing ideas and topics, but writing about Open Education stuff seemed to fit the bill. Some of the posts started to be influenced by my work as an Educational Developer at the time, dealing with presentations, workshops, and discussions about everything from edtech to blended learning to course design. Moving onto my work focusing on distance ed, blogging became a place for me to get my thinking outside of myself regarding questions or discussions that came up in my work often. Finally, it evolved to little experiments or ideas I needed to get down so I could have them handy and available for conversations with instructors. We could be talking about ideas for their course and I could reach into here and say “something like this?”. Putting tangible examples infront of them was so helpful for the work instead of just talking abstractly.
Every now and then I hit these lulls in blogging, but lucky for me some in my network host things like eCampus Ontario’s 9x9x25 which give me different approaches I can bring to writing. I also borrow an approach from Stephen Downes and Doug Belshaw to reflect or respond to specific works. This latter approach maybe keeps me from commenting on their sites directly, but hopefully the pingbacks are working correctly.
So there we have it. Another brick in the Blogwall. I’m not quite sure what it is, just laying bricks, building a wall, or building a cathedral – to borrow from the mason’s inquiry – but I’m here nonetheless. Thanks for being here too.
Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash