Last week, in addition to the noise around Facebook, there was also another vanity URL oriented geek event. WordPress 2.8 was released and it was the first time since 2.7 that a full .X upgrade was available to users over the new automated update system. In typical WordPress fashion, everything generally went smooth (one install kept wanting to log in again and again, having stuck itself in some kind of loop) until it came to looking at what plugins were working or not. For this blog, having quite a few plugins running in the back (lots of plugins will be tried here for other projects), this stage is getting longer all the time. Thankfully, there are resources (WordPress, et al) for plugins, but not for themes as of yet. So one of the things that you might have noticed if you visit the blog, is that the theme has changed again. Even though Fusion the theme that I was running is one of the featured themes, it seems to not want to work properly for me. So I’ve changed my theme again. I’ve also changed the tagline for this blog.
This tagline change was motivated by part of an epiphany – I’ve been blogging more about teaching in general without regard for prefix than anything else over the last four year. Previously I was blogging under the tagline that touched on technology, teaching, photography and my journey in addition to whatever else I wanted to write about. But now, after thinking about what I’ve really been writing about since the start, I’ve changed it to “Thoughts on the technologies that help us tell stories“. The majority of my posts have been thoughts and I’m very much a believer in the idea that teaching is all about telling a story and that humanity has, since inception, used any technology available to try to tell stories with more umph and record them in some fashion to pass it on to others. This passing of stories is arguably the best way to teach and learn. Hopefully this new tagline (business plan or mission or whatever you might want to formalize it to) guides me well for the next four years. I don’t think things are going to change that much, but, for me, it will certainly free the thoughts that I put down here.
Thanks to @zirkazirka and @numerix for pointing me to this interesting book – On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition and fiction that fits with this idea.
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