When my wife and I first moved to Cambodia in 2005 we decided to start a blog. Mainly it was a way for us to let a bunch of people back home know what we were up to. Although our blog wasn’t read by a bunch of people it was much easier for us to create a post and add a couple pics than it was manage all those emails flying back and forth from the same number of people.
Adios Muchacho
People back home liked seeing how our life was changing by living abroad. They also like seeing all the cool places we were able to go on vacation.
But as Facebook became more popular and life abroad just became “normal” for us it became more and more “work” to keep the blog going.
500 million can't be wrong...
Another event that coincided with our blog’s decline was that I finished graduate school.
Yeehaawww
I know this sounds funny but I was writing so much for graduate school that I would use the blog as a sort of outlet or release. All the writing I did for school was academic and sort of dry. I would be sitting and writing for hours and at a certain point I just needed to write something that was fun, exciting, or funny. I found if I took a short break from the academic writing and busted out a totally inconsequential post about Tuk-Tuk drivers or our weekend at the beach I could get back to work with renewed gusto.
Since I was writing so much my mind was in a state where I could easily draw on ideas and translate those into a post rather quickly. When my degree was completed and I stopped writing so much it took longer once I sat down and started writing to dig in and get something down. I eventually stopped updating our blog altogether.
I think another reason was that I didn’t keep the blog going is that I lost a clear audience or focus. As I said earlier, things that at first were exotic and new just became normal. More and more people back home lost interest as well. One friend even said to me one summer that he stopped reading because he was sick of hearing about all our great vacations.
This brings us to the present. Lately I have been interacting more and more with a group of educators from around the world. We have been sharing information and I feel like it has taken what I do in the classroom and pushed it to the next level. With all that I have seen and learned from my PLN I now feel the need to be more of a contributer. I feel in a way, the more you contribute the more you will get in return. If you can show someone something cool and useful they are more apt to share something back. They may also show you how they use the same or similar tool in a unique and dynamic way and in the end you’ve actually learned something more in sharing than you would have otherwise. Or someone may just stumble across your blog one day and it may give them and idea for a cool project or unit or tool they could use in their classroom which would make the whole effort worthwhile in my mind.
I also feel like for me it will become a digital archive or sort of digital portfolio of my accomplishments as an educator. If you blog about what you are doing professionally, prospective employers can already see what you can and are doing without having to ask. As the age old adage goes “Actions speak louder than words”.
So in the end and for the reasons discussed I’ve decided to become more of a contributer. And for the time being it’s going to be a blog. It is pretty convenient that I need to create this blog for coursework but hey, I’m going to go with it. The question is, will you come along?
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