A year of blogging

by | Thursday, January 01, 2009

It was exactly a year ago, on the first of January 2008, that I began blogging (see first posting here). When I started I wasn’t sure how well this blogging thing would work out.

Now 12 months and 376 posts later – I have to say that I have truly enjoyed this. I had set a goal for myself of making 30 posts a month, and for the most part (June being the biggest exception, followed by December) I met these goals (actually ending up with more than a post a day on average!).

The design of the site has pretty much stayed the same, some minor tweaking aside.

More importantly I have come to enjoy blogging. I know a couple of people who have been following my writing – and that is great. But the greatest gain has been personal, providing me with a space to put my thoughts into words – sort of half-way between the inchoate thoughts that flit through my mind and more formal academic writing. [I wrote about the three kinds of posts I tend to generate, and how that influenced the design of the site here.]

This is what I would like to expand further in the year to come. So one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog less frequently but more seriously. So fewer links to cool sites that I run across but a greater number of mini-essays on technology, learning, creativity and play.

Here’s to 2009!

Topics related to this post: Blogging | Fun | Housekeeping | Learning | Personal | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving

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Charleston, SC for SITE 09

I am off to Charleston, SC for the SITE 2009 conference. . I can't believe it has been a year since Matt Koehler and I presented our Keynote. I am sending this note sitting in the Michigan Flyer bus (making good use of their free wi-fi) and am looking forward to a...

Mathematical insight on reality & you (yes, you!)

Mathematical insight on reality & you (yes, you!)

I have always been intrigued by the manner in which everyday ideas get "mathematicized" (if that's a word). For instance, the other day, on a bus-stop by my office I noticed an equation written on the wall. I have no idea why it was there, but...

26 years ago… My first publication!

Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story titled "We all fall down," that was published the popular-science magazine Science Today. Science Today, edited by Mukul Sharma who wrote science fiction himself, was maybe the only outlet where you could...

Of teaching & cooking

Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...

Demotivational Posters II

A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along...

Not so Cuil

I was just trying out Cuil the new search engine and came up with some strange results. This is what the front page looks like, rather dark for my liking, but again they had to do something different from Google's stark white front page. if you click on the "About...

Tiger by the tail

A while ago I blogged about a column by David Brooks in the NYTimes (Flipping the Tech & Ed equation). Brooks described research by Goldin and Katz indicating a "race between technology and education" based on the idea that technology is (by its very nature) skill...

The perception of taste

A new study (with brain scanning no less) indicates that the more expensive the wine the better it tastes. As the MindHacks article (Higher price makes cheap wine taste better) reports, participants rated the more expensive wine as being more likeable even it was...

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