Photo by fauxels
Almost 20 years ago, when I started blogging as a graduate student, my posts were mostly about what I was reading related to my dissertation research.
I was what my colleague Wendy F. called a “traditional” graduate student. I had full funding with scholarships to enable me to be a full-time student. I was married to another grad student, but we had no kids. I did not have to work, but chose to work as a graduate assistant on faculty research projects and as a teaching assistant in the B.Ed. program to gain more experience with research and teaching. I blogged about my experiences and the things I was reading about once a week or so.
As I moved on to postdoc and faculty positions, I struggled to find work-life balance. I had young children, and if I wrote, it was to author or contribute to grant proposals, conference papers, refereed book chapters, and most importantly, peer-reviewed journal articles. My blogging became more sporadic, and I almost gave up entirely. The way blogging was framed in the Office was not for me, for my own professional development, but rather for others to benefit from my expertise in digital technologies, digital pedagogies, open educational practices, etc.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all about supporting others in teaching and learning. However, the way I approach blogging is more like a virtual space, a reflection journal for my own identity development as a scholar, rather than a website or repository where I share teaching publications or resources.
Blog posts are now included in promotion and tenure (or permanence) criteria, despite regular faculty not really understanding the impact that they may have in our field, so I would rather publish peer-reviewed journal articles for scholarship. Not surprisingly, I lost interest in blogging for research purposes until recently.
I suppose I could have been sharing open-licensed teaching materials on my blog, but that thought did not really occur to me until recently. Why? Because I had to unlearn years and years of training to become an educational researcher (2002-2011). I started working as an educational developer in the Office of Open Learning (OOL) in September 2014. I included blog post assignments in graduate courses and faculty development courses from 2004-2019 or so, until COVID-19. The pivot to remote/online teaching ensured that the OOL, a central service unit stayed, well, very busy supporting faculty instructors.
While I feel like I am still experiencing PTSD from the pandemic and surviving the tenure process (2017-2022), I am going to revisit blogging for myself again. I will have been back on campus and teaching in-person courses for three years in Fall 2024.
To resuscitate my scholarship, I will attempt to blog about things I read in the coming months.
Leave a Reply