I realized that I had quit reading blogs when the RSS reader I used died and I couldn’t find a replacement. When I quit reading blogs, I also stopped writing on my own blog. That meant I was doing less reflecting on my practice.

Some laugh, saying they never left. I guess, I’m one of those hold-outs. I’ve kept the lights on, but declining energy in the evenings, a lessening sense of urgency to keep sharing one thing (or more) I learn each day, resulting in a diminished flow of blog entries. After all, edubloggers don’t die…they just fade away, to paraphrase Gen. McArthur’s observation about soldiers.

The real issue is that social media like Twitter knocked out blogging. Oh, some people continued to use blog platforms to publish work, but seldom to engage in reflections on their own learning, experiences, or to share solutions. The imperative for blogging faded to a “do it if you want to, but only if it matters to you.” 

Those who blogged to gain fame and a wide readership, well, they followed the crowds. The bloggers who did it for themselves, a way to build a second brain they could track their elusive ideas, kept on typing.

#PSA: The many recent (and no so recent) articles advocating for more people to #blog are wonderful. Just be mindful of which service you choose to build your blog on.

❓  Here are some questions to ask yourself when you select a blogging service/host:

1. Can you conveniently migrate your content away from the service if you decide to make a change down the line? Or does the service effectively lock you down once you’re all set up?

2. See 1. above.

⚠️ Setting up your own site is easier than ever. So is falling into a trap where some services make it really difficult for you to ever move away if you decide to.

#DataPortability #Blogging #FreeYourData (source)

Read my reflection on switching blog platforms.

While I didn’t find myself in such dire straits without an RSS reader/aggregator, I did get frustrated with the solutions that got me to the one I’m relying on now. Those solutions, Inoreader and Feedly, worked but always had the need to interject something (e.g. advertisements, recommended posts, blah blah blah). The truth is, I simply wanted something that would let me manage my RSS feeds, so I could read and blog. In the end, I stopped reading RSS feeds on my phone. They left me frustrated, with the need to write and respond but not wanting to do so on my smartphone. Now, I read RSS and blog from my computer.

In addition to this need, I also had a profound desire to clean out my RSS feeds. I had found myself following a lot of the usual suspects, educators who had “branded” themselves and were actively supplementing their educator lifestyles and salaries with books, speaking gigs, and more. 

These, and allow me to use this word I picked up on Mastodon from conversations with others, “edutainers” seemed more intent on making money than sharing solutions flowing from their own experience and scholarship. Instead of a goal of reflecting on what you’d learned through experience, read other’s work, they were caught in a frenzy of creative effluence that quickly had them appealing to Teachers Pay Teachers and other outlets.

Fortunately, there are many educators still out there who share simply to solve a problem, to bring the hard won fruits of their labor to an audience of colleagues who will welcome the solution and share their journey with others. It’s the approach I try to take when writing blog entries at TechNotes. Sharing those blog entries via Mastodon with a non-American audience has taught me an important lesson…to understand blog entries, you almost have to be raised up in the same culture as the blogger who wrote them. 

I often feel that either my writing must have gotten incredibly difficult to read, and/or, our cultural referents are so different, foreigners online have to work extra hard to define vocabulary and connect to concepts. The challenge is one that I face as well when reading writing from outside the USA.

Still, even as my brain is irritated by this dissonance, this reciprocal dialogue among learners, teachers, readers, leaders makes blogging so much more fun. At least, I think so. That’s why I see the “return to blogging” posts on Mastodon with interest. I am MORE interested in Mastodon users reading my blog entries, those I publish here at ATC and the other edu-blogging space. And, to be honest, I have no worries about the Mastodon onslaught on the blog. 

Stephen Downes at Half an Hour points out:

The way the fediverse works is different from the way trad social media works. We don’t all follow the same account. No megaphones here. Rather, some people follow it, and if there’s anything of note, they pass it along to their friends. And so on, through layers of friends, each acting as a filter, adding commentary or perspective as needed. 

Thus the network protects itself from misinformation, objectionable content, and cascade effects.

While that may be true, I hope that more folks read and share content. If we are, as Mastodon users are fond of saying, “our own algorithm,” then it’s critically important we share content. That’s why I try to “prime the pump” for conversation every day with two or three blog entries.

The Verge’s article is a love letter to blogging of the past (and present). In one part of that article, this appears, capturing what several did do:

For those who were a little more adventurous, you could purchase an actual domain name, pay for website hosting, and go for it that way. 

Whichever model a person chose, they were typing their long and short-form thoughts into a screen and sending them out into the world to be consumed by the masses — whomever those masses were. 

I sympathize with the edutainers…weren’t all edubloggers evolving as a result of their reflections? Wasn’t that evolution to end up as a keynote speaker? Perhaps, we should have mapped out different paths. Instead of evolving to be high-paid consultants, we grounded our work in reflected practice.

Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s actions so as to take a critical stance or attitude towards one’s own practice and that of one’s peers, engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning. 

According to one definition it involves “paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight”.

A key rationale for reflective practice is that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning; deliberate reflection on experience is essential.

Reflective practice can be an important tool in practice-based professional learning settings where people learn from their own professional experiences, rather than from formal learning or knowledge transfer. It may be the most important source of personal professional development and improvement. It is also an important way to bring together theory and practice; through reflection a person is able to see and label forms of thought and theory within the context of his or her work.

A person who reflects throughout his or her practice is not just looking back on past actions and events, but is taking a conscious look at emotions, experiences, actions, and responses, and using that information to add to his or her existing knowledge base and reach a higher level of understanding.

Introducing FeedBro

An OPML File to Import

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