Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

On Blogging: Finding Peace With the Pit

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I haven’t gone all meta on my blogging in a while…

There’s never a dearth of people I meet who come to the idea of blogging and feel that pit in their stomachs. “What would I blog about?” “Who would want to read what I write?” Or even, “I can’t write at all.” I try to assuage their fears by reminding them that they don’t have to write manifestos or tell stories of their personal lives. That blogging can simply be a link to a good read, a short snip for flavor, and a few sentences of reflection. Start slowly. Build if and when it gets more comfortable.

But what I don’t tell them is that even though I’ve been doing this blogging thing for 11 years, I still feel that pit more often than not. And that’s especially true when I try to push into longer posts or when I attempt journal articles or even think about books. Invariably, I struggle with huge doubt. I start thinking about all the really brilliant people who I’ve interacted with over the years, those thinkers and writers who fry my brain, who seem so confident when they write in blogs or articles or books. People who are manifestly smarter than I. (There are many.) I imagine these people reading what I’m writing and rolling their eyes, picking apart my shoddy logic or argument, tossing my ideas on the scrap heap of failed thinking around education. I literally feel their disdain. 

Most times, I’m able to push through it. Sometimes not. It’s a constant struggle that, in the end, I think helps me to grow as a blogger and a writer. Even though it would be nice just every now and then to feel a little swagger around my ideas, I never want to feel so secure in what I’m thinking and writing that I stop feeling at least an ounce of two of “oh crap” when I press “publish." 

So, yeah. You want to be a blogger or a writer or a creator of any type of artifact that you share with the world? You’re going to have to find peace with that pit. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because the good news is that most often, if the pushback comes, it’s about the ideas and not about you. Which is as it should be.

Welcome to My New Space Online

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After 10 years of blogging, I’ve decided to move my efforts away from Weblogg-ed over to here, my new site on Tumblr. You can read some of my reasoning here, but safe to say more than anything else, I just felt like I needed a change, that the world has changed, and that what I want to do online has changed as well. I will forever be grateful to the many readers and commentors who have stopped by my blog over the last few years as they have pushed my thinking and learning immeasurably. I really hope that continues here as well.

This is a bit of new adventure, an experiment in blogging, in community, in portfolio-making and a whole bunch more. I’m still working out the kinks in my process here, but I hope to be sharing out on a regular basis not only the long form writing that my old blog was built upon but also shorter snips with more concise comment, that space between my blog and my Twitter account. Both have left me frustrated of late, so I’m hoping this will closer to that sweet spot that I’m looking for. 

Please feel free to comment and link and expand the conversation around change in schools and the impact that technologies are having on learning. It’s a most interesting time to be in education, much to figure out, much to learn. Hopefully we can do much of that together.

Thanks for reading. 

10 Years of Blogging: Time for a Change and a Book

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So last week it marked 10 years since my first blog post, a full decade of writing and sharing online. As I’ve said many times before, it’s been an amazing journey. I don’t think I could have imagined the many ways that blogging was going to change my life, in a learning sense, in a professional sense, and in a personal sense. I still find all of it strangely bizarre, like I’ve been pulled along on this most excellent ride that has simply been a privilege to experience. I’m so very fortunate to be doing something that I love, something that constantly challenges me and keeps me on the edge of my brain, and something that connects me to such passionate and smart people both online and offline on a regular basis. I am, in a word, humbled. Thanks to all of you who have supported my learning these last 10 years.

That said, I’ve been thinking for quite a while now that I need to change things up a bit in terms of the way I’m sharing with the world. It’s become a struggle to blog in long form here. Yet I’ve not found the short form of Twitter to be anywhere close to a substitute for the extended conversations that take place here. (And to be honest, Twitter is a totally crappy archive of reading and thinking.) While I’ve tried to like it, Facebook just is not a place that I find myself wanting to spend much if any of my time. (I have a theory as to why , but I’ll share that in another post.) More and more as I think about “curating” my learning world, I find myself wanting to stow all the good stuff in one place, all the blog posts, quotes, pictures, graphics, photos, bookmarks, videos and other snips that I find interesting. I know I could do that here. But here’s the other thing…I’m also in constant need of fresh voices an perspectives. I’ve been pretty much connected to the same fairly small group for a long time now. Not that there’s anything wrong with those folks, but I need, I want to branch out.

So, I’ve decided to pretty much bring my run here at Weblogg-ed to a close. I’m not taking the site down, but for all of those reasons and more, I’m moving my writing over to a new space on Tumblr that feels like, to me at least, a better space for the kinds of writing and curating and linking that I want to do. I’ve been playing there for the last month or so, connecting with some of the people in that community, and I’m looking forward to connecting even more. I’m feeling a sense of energy that really appeals to me, and while there are some drawbacks (lack of rss feeds for individual tags, for instance) it’s just seems like the space I want to be at the moment. I know there is some danger in the all eggs in one basket model…but I’ve got a post brewing about that as well. And I’m not ignorant of the effects the switch may have on my “findability” in the larger webspace. But I’m also not so worried about that. I sincerely hope you’ll follow me there and continue to engage in these conversations around change.

And finally, another new book.

Before you say it, I completely understand the irony of a book of collected blog posts, which is exactly what Corwin Press is publishing in August with about 40 or so of the most commented on pieces found here in this space over the last 10 years. The idea for doing the book was broached by my editor at ISTE last year, and at first, I blanched at the prospect. But I came around for three main reasons. First, while it may seem kind of strange to those who have read this blog in the past, there are still lots of people out there who have yet to entertain the notion of change that this collection argues for. It’s the kind of “meet them where they are” strategy, and if this book can help do that, great. Second, it will give me a chance to help some schools that might be in need of technology or infrastructure to make those changes happen. I’ve decided that all of the after tax profits that this book may generate will be used to fund learning initiatives at deserving schools or organizations. We’re not talking Bill Gates dollars here, obviously, but I’ll report out next April or May what the totals are and what the projects look like. (If you have any suggestions on how that giving might be structured, let me know.) And finally, on a personal note, as much as I talk and write about the future of the written form, I find great honor in being asked to put this book together. It may be an anachronism by the time my grandkids are around to see it, and I know there is little or no real reason to print it out, but there’s still a piece of me that finds a printed book inspiring. Maybe it will spark some conversations about grandpa down the road.

To all of you who have stopped by here over the last decade, I can’t thank you guys enough for reading and sharing with me. Here’s to new beginnings and even more powerful conversations ahead. Keep changing the world.

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newsweek:

Tumblr now hosts more blogs than WordPress

From Mashable:

In January, Tumblr had more than 7 million individual blogs. At the time Mashable posted this article, the total blog ticker on the site read about three times that at 20,873,182 — beating out WordPress.com’s current count of 20,787,904 by about 85,000 blogs.

Hear the Coatster (that’s Tumblr’s Mark Coatney) talk about this on NPR

https://willrichardson.com/tumblr-beats-wordpress/

Why Blogging is Hard…Still

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So at some point in recent weeks the blog-post-o-meter rolled through 3,000, and if I’m even close in my estimation that the average length of posts over the last seven and a half years has been around 3-400 words, that suggests about 1 million words of writing and reflecting and thinking here. That’s a pretty staggering number in my feeble brain.  You’d think that after all of that output this publishing thing would be almost as easy as breathing.

Well, it’s not.

I’m reminded of this because of conversations we’ve been having of late with team leaders in PLP. While the successes are many and impressive, a good number of people still find the thought of publishing to an audience, even a relatively small, private audience of like-minded souls, to be too daunting. It’s just way outside their comfort zone, and they just believe that their contributions would either not be relevant, interesting or useful. It’s hard to nurture these folks, to convince them to take small steps, to help them see the potential upside. And I really believe that there is an upside to sharing what you know and do with others; it’s the foundation for building learning networks.

But here is the thing: no matter how you slice it, blogging is a risk. And it’s a risk not just because you are putting yourself out there for the world, but because unlike many other types of writing that we do, it’s unfinished. At least that’s the way it feels for me. I don’t KNOW very much for certain. But blogging isn’t about what I know as much as it’s about what I think I know, and I find that to be a crucial distinction. For me, it’s the distinction that constantly makes this hard. It’s also the distinction, however, that makes blogging worth it. The one thing that a potential global audience does more than anything else is create the opportunity to really learn through writing in various texts, through the conversation and feedback that ensues. I say this all the time, that while a lot of my learning occurs in the composing of the post (or whatever), most of it occurs in the distributed reactions (when they happen) after I publish.

One thing I do know is that when I write with a humility of not knowing I get a lot more learning in return. That plays out in my reading as well. I am not the greatest commentor on other people’s blogs (though I am working on that.) But I find I am much more compelled to comment on posts where the author is obviously testing unfinished ideas. Where that person is not simply saying “this is the way the world is.” I find those types of posts less compelling.

And, obviously, the other risk is that my “thin thinking” will not simply be responded to but will be ripped to shreds at the hands of those who disagree or who may be smarter or more wordly than I. (They number in the billions.) Fortunately, that has not happened very often here, with some notable exceptions. What is hard to convey to new bloggers and publishers is that the debate is almost always civil, and that those naysayers who denigrate and tear down what they perceive as ignorance are not worth listening to. They are not teachers. I welcome disagreement, but I will tune out those who voice it with cynicism regardless of the validity of their response. When I read those constant smirkers, I wonder if they would treat younger learners the same way? Luckily, it seems, few of them are in classrooms.

Despite all of this, for me, right now, the rewards far outweigh the risks. I just wish I knew better how to convey that to those who see the scales tipping steeply in the other direction. And I wish I could help them understand that the angst I still feel every time I press “publish” is a good thing on balance, not something to avoid as much as to embrace as a path to a greater awareness of myself and of the world around me.

(Image “Sanskrit Blogging on the Rise” by chucks.)

Filter Fun

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So I’ve been getting tweaked by filters again and the amount of stuff that many schools block and try to keep away from kids and, to a depressingly large extent, teachers as well. I know this is just a repeat of the same basic issues that have been floating around here for a while, but for some reason I’ve been slamming into that wall both technically and intellectually in the past weeks more than usual. Frustrating when it seems to be getting worse instead of better.

At one recent event, I had a couple of hours between my sessions and since the wireless was spotty, one of the school administrators offered up his office and his computer for me to use. “Slow as hell,” he said as he logged me in. He wasn’t kidding. But the worst part was that I really needed to get onto my Gmail account to snag a file and it was, of course, blocked. Google docs, blocked. YouTube, blocked. Webpages came up with photos and videos “x’d” out. Apparently, everyone in the school suffered under the same filter. And the same was true of a school superintendent I spoke with who lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

I swear I wanted to grab them both and shake them and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you stand for that?”

Oy.

I say this all the time, but I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is.

Seriously, am I missing something? Why is that so hard to implement?

The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.

$12.50 for Five Words

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That’s what it’s going to cost you to excerpt in your blog any content published by the Associated Press under it’s new pricing structure. According to a pseudo FAQ on copyright that the AP has published:

Don’t use your browser to cut, copy, and paste content. It is wrong and, in most cases, illegal.

That right there might cost me under the new guidelines.

The potential scenarios for what are and are not billable excerpts are a nightmare, and articulated fairly well at BetaNews. Jeff Jarvis sees this as the beginning of the end for the AP, and bloggers everywhere are yelling and screaming and debating the impact. And how this plays out is important for our own understanding of how to teach this stuff to our kids. I know that Gary’s comment on my previous post about this is an important point in the debate despite his cynicism, and I hope he draws it out more here. But this is another benchmark in the disruption, another test that I find fascinating on many levels, and one that is worth our attention and conversation.

Blogging Ethics

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Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:

It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.

I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.

What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.

The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.

Engaging Writing in the Classroom

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So here is the money quote from “Turn Teen Texting Toward Better Writing” from the Christian Science Monitor last week:

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.

The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.

Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.

My Blogging Legacy

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So considering Mother’s Day was a couple of days ago, it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking a fair amount about my own mom who died suddenly 27 years ago (has it been that long?) leaving me with a slew of unanswered questions about my family history, my young childhood, her views on life, etc.. Seems like just as I was getting old enough to really have a somewhat intellectual relationship with her as well as a mother-son relationship, she was gone. Still makes me sad.

Last night I had this kind of cool waking dream that is no doubt related to her death and to the holiday. It was at some point in the future, after my own death (hopefully way, way into the future) and my kids were struggling with some of the same questions that I had about my own history. What were they like as kids? Why did we move? What were my grandparents like? But in this dream, even though I wasn’t there to answer them, they had another resource.

What I envisioned was them turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies. Certainly not anything that hasn’t been thought of before, but It was, as I said, a pretty cool vision.

I think that dream brought to light another aspect of why I blog. Not just to reflect. Not just to learn. But in some small way to leave a trail for those who come after me. I certainly can’t predict to what extent those people might find any of this relevant or compelling or useful, but I know I would love to have the chance to dig through the work of my own mother, to learn about her more deeply, to understand who she was and what she stood for. If nothing else, my kids will have that opportunity.

And with that thought, it’s 26 hours of travel home…

And No Blog Tattoos Either

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From the “Circling the Wagons Department” it seems the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures. For some reason, letting others know that your are a blogger is highly problematic, and the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blogs. (Hadn’t heard that one before.) As Lisa Nielsen, the manager of professional development for the Department of Instructional Technology writes on her blog, it’s not a direction that serves the DOE.

I find this particularly upsetting because…having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures.

No doubt, employee blogs can be problematic and are not always to be celebrated. And I do recognize the need to monitor what people in your organization are doing. But the reality here is this: educators in New York City who want to connect and share with other educators around the world are going to do that. Some of them will do it well, others, notsomuch. Celebrate the former, educate the latter. Learn from the experience and from the sharing that takes place. In the end, this is once again just lazy policy in action.

On The Need for Blogging Balance

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What, me worry?

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Oy.