So I’ve started two new courses this semester which will bring my total number of courses taken as part of my Masters of Educational Technology degree up to 6. If taking two courses works out well, and I don’t end up estranged from my family, I’ll probably do the same both semesters next year, and finish off my degree quickly.
In any case, one of these courses is requiring us to set up a blog on the UBC web servers, which some of the students in the course have objected to, given that a lot of us already have external web hosts with our own blogs, and wish to gather our stuff together, rather than spreading it out. I’ve already got three blogs, why should I start another?
This situation caused me to reflect on my own practices, and to look at why I have multiple blogs, and whether a blog which only used for a short term, for a single course, is really useful.
I have 3 blogs right now. Obviously one of them is this blog which you are reading. It’s intended for generating discussion around my professional practices as an educator, and as part of my professional portfolio. Write down what you think as a professional, and if people agree with it, you get recognition. It’s not a lot of recognition, but it helps and I am sure it is part of the reason I’m employed full-time next year in what seems like a difficult market for teachers, British Columbia.
Another one of my blogs is for my coding experiments and work. It’s meant to be a record of what I have learned since I started my foray into web programming 4 years ago. It hasn’t been updated in a couple of months, largely because I haven’t been doing any programming recently. I go through fits and spurts, which you can do when it’s a hobby and not your profession. I’ve actually started to get some work as a result of this blog, in the language with which I have the least experience, which is interesting.
I also have had a blog associated with my school which is expressly for disseminating information to my students, and to give my students a bit of playground with which to create their own summaries of what is happening in class. I have no idea if anyone outside of my class is reading this blog, mostly because I’ve disabled anonymous comments on the blog. It isn’t really meant to be a public discourse with the whole world, although it is publically visible.
Each of these blogs has its own purpose. They live separately from each other because of this. People who are interested in what I think about education aren’t necessarily going to care about my programming or summaries of high school mathematics lessons. The same is true of the other two blogs.
Since I have so many blogs already, I don’t really want to start a new one just for this course. It’s a lot to keep track of and keep updated. So my plan is to create the blog as requested, update it for this course (the next 13 weeks) and then migrate all of the content over to this blog and remove the course blog once it’s no longer necessary. Sounds like a plan?
