Today my blogging effort – in any serious form turns 4. Four years has certainly seen quite a bit of change for me personally and professionally and it has seen all manner of change for technology and well some of it has made it’s way to the classroom in either k-12 or higher ed.
So with this in mind, I thought it might be interesting to see what I was posting about on my previous blogversaries.
May 2005 was when I moved off the SpyMac (yeah, remember when they were relevant and a real site, not some sort of frankensite with the old forums in the back?) and onto Blogger. My motivation for this was an AMTEC conference in Calgary and a presentation from Rob Wall. I was talking about the need for techs and admins to also know about the learning process – especially since so many of them are being tasked with supporting ed-tech in k-20. I would also argue that it is very useful for EdTechers to know about the tech and admin side, enough so that they are able to ask for what they want or need. I also posted “Back Light” as my very first “POW”. Other things going on were the advent of perpendicular recording (which I finally got on on my systems in December) and the increasing uptake of RSS.
Fast forward a year and I was talking about how podcasts can increase meaningful contact time, how I was planning to run a half marathon in 2008 (that didn’t come to pass due to injury, so I went to Vegas for a baby-moon instead) after clocking an amazing 45min time for 10km – my new goal is to do this by 2011 (babies have a funny way of re-ordering life). Other news had the Oilers in the playoffs and Boot Camp being tested on the Mac. Those were indeed heady days. As 2007 came, social networks were items of interest as were “just enough” uses of technology (nee Hole in the Wall) and alternative interfaces. Last year ePortfolios, cyberbullying and txting had their portions of my interest.
It seems that my thoughts have migrated from looking only at those technologies that can be or are being used in the classroom, to those that can make things more convenient for an information workflow in one’s personal life and then, by osmosis, find their way into the classroom or lecture theater. I’ve also toned down the Mac fan-boy element in favour of system that get things done (which is still 99.999% of the time Mac ;)) and those things that are just cool and no longer teathered to the desktop – nee phones. Over the last year, with over 4000 posts to Twitter, I’ve also noticed myself blogging less, but I think the value of the posts has increased for me. Many times I’d put up a short post because the act of writing helped me remember. Now I do the same thing with Twitter.
I would not even want to try to guess where things are going to be in another 4 years, but hopefully this blog will still be around. Next year I’m looking forward to seeing how Google’s Wave is going to change things for social networks – powerful real time messaging and collaboration makes me think that it will be able to one up Facebook in terms of being able to share images, exchange documents and send messages. It will also be flexibile enough to pull in much of what might come out over the next while as well. It should be interesting.
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