Mid april musings RE: blogs
this is the last full week of classes at GVSU and i am bombarded with theses from students trying to wrap the semester up. nothing new there, but i have neglected my blog. blogs are an interesting development the past many years. my family blog started in about 2000; though, i didn’t call it a blog at the time . . . it was called our journal back then. i used HTML to update entries. 2000 is when our first child was born, so most entries were required to include photos to keep grandparents happy. i eventually (later 2001ish) moved from HTML to postnuke or phpnuke (a CMS tool) and continued the “blog” running. once blogging took off, i decided to convert my family journal to a blog, but i kept it in the tool i was using . . . mostly because i didn’t understand MySQL stuff enough to export the database and import it into a new tool. actually, i still don’t. but i finally moved it all to Wordpress and i’ve spent the past 1.5 years trying to copy-and-paste old entries from HTML and from the CMS into Wordpress. i think i only have about a year gap left to transfer. it’s one of those back-burner projects that always comes after everything else. we update our family blog about once a month these days. a little more when bigger things happen. but the blog serves a purpose and the audience is consistent and fairly static.
this blog, however, serves an entirely different purpose. sometimes i tend to forget why i started this blog and i often feel like it’s a chore to do. on the other hand, writing for the blog forces me to try and follow the ed tech blogging community to see what’s going on, so i still enjoy the blog as a motivation for staying active. but, i thought it would be nice to evaluate my blog up to this point nearly 2 years after i started it. in my second post here i wrote, “i will use this blog to help trace my steps as i try and improve my online teaching and as i test out new tools along the way.” if i look back, i can clearly see many blog entries that highlight tools i’ve tried and strategies i’ve used in my online teaching. i have had a fairly light semester this semester with a weekend class (Jan./Feb.) and thesis students, so i haven’t had much to experiment with lately. in a few weeks, our spring/summer semester starts and i will be back in the saddle as i am scheduled to teach an online undergrad ed tech course and a 2 week long grad course in ed tech. i plan to upgrade to the new phpBB 3.0 forums, which you can see here; though, the beta has been out since January (beta 5) and there’s no sign of the final release, so i have to decide whether to use a near finished beta (#5) if i don’t hear anything in the next 2 weeks. i am also going to upgrade my course to the latest Drupal (5.1), so i have new tools to learn. as i finish more preparations for the course, i want to come back and explain some of the curricular changes that i am going to try in my undergraduate course. i have much to say, but i just didn’t have the best semester to write about the kinds of things that were the reason for making this blog in the first place. hopefully that’s about to change. whew! ;~)