About 6 and a half years ago, I started a blog. The purpose of the blog was to provide updates for my family back home while my (new) wife and I were living abroad in London, England. At the time, Facebook was still a closed site for college students, and Myspace was too messy to share with my parents. I needed an electronic space to share pictures, thoughts, and stories from our lives.
As I was jumping into learning programming, and educational technology, I decided to switch from the free hosting offered by Blogspot to my own server. I first installed Movable Type, then WordPress, and finally settled on Drupal for my blog, learning each of the technologies as I transfered between them. My first choice of domains, "UnitOrganizer.com" was intended to be a place for teachers to share their ideas, in the form of unit plans. That never actually came together, and a couple of years later I switched to my own name for my domain.
During the past few years I’ve switched from blogging about my personal life, to blogging about my programming projects, to blogging as a form of eportfolio, to blogging about my interests in education almost exclusively. I’ve had more opportunities come to me than I can count through my blog including having the opportunity to write a textbook, be published in 3 different magazines, have a short series of articles in a newspaper, and to present at conferences all over the world.
I read through some of my earliest writing, and I can see a big difference between both the strength of my writing and the quality of the ideas behind the writing. My earliest writing on education is fairly naive sounding to me today. I wonder what I will think of my writing in 10 years.
To those of you considering a blog, I say go ahead and do it. The opportunity for reflection and personal growth have been tremendous.