Here’s To Making Art

I got my credit card bill the other day. As usual around this time of year, an automated amount is charged to me from Edublogs. This small investment keeps this blog alive and visible on the web. But it takes more than that payment to keep this place alive. It needs me.

Check out this graph below. It shows my blog post frequency over the years that I have been running Open Educator (originally Teaching Generation Z).blog activity

I have found it hard to get back into the writing groove. Purpose has been missing. But little habits that would feed this beast have contributed to the downturn. I used to scroll through Google Reader over breakfast and tag items of interest into possible future posts, make mental notes to engage with certain personalities over issues of interest and so on. But not having a decent replacement has meant that I have let a lot of that go. I've been conscious that in my current role, that most things of interest from a writing perspective involve delving too closely into personal observations of colleagues and I have wanted to respect their right to not have their professional interactions microscoped in a public forum by someone who is meant to be leading in the ethical and powerful use of technology for learning. I've often felt out of touch with things. I've had some extended family distractions that have dulled my enthusiasm for blogging - for a while, these issues were ruining my golf as well which is not a good thing. I also felt that I have nothing really to write about and deep down, my ego tells me that no one is probably reading any more, either.

I can remember the enthusiasm and passion when I started putting my ideas and thoughts here. I can only admire those bloggers who were blogging regularly then and are still doing so now. Alan Levine, Stephen Downes, Brian Lamb, Tom Hoffmann, Doug Johnson, Wesley Fryer, Miguel Guhlin and Tom Woodward just to name a few. But quite a few super talented writers that I loved reading - Christian Long, Doug Noon, Ken Rodoff, Jennifer Jones, Alex Hayes - no longer do so. Their reasons are their own but it shows that purpose is a big part of chosing this public digital place as a repository for half-baked, embryonic, still fermenting concepts and realisations.

Darcy Norman is still one of those original "edubloggers" that I started reading when I first started this blog. Now that Google Reader is dead, I found this post from him while sifting through Feedly (the new but not as enticing aggregator I now use) that rings pretty true to me.

We’re living in a time when it’s never been easier to share what we do, at little or no cost, and people get hung up on how they will need to squeeze their creations through a press to extract every last drop of monetization out of it. That’s not the point. Create because you are creative. Share because you give a shit. Or don’t.

I don’t generate a profit from anything I do outside of my Day Job™. At least, not directly. But being creative and sharing makes me better at my Day Job™, so has likely made me “profit” indirectly. How do you calculate that? Easy. You don’t. Well, I don’t.

 

I think some of the most fun I've had blogging was when I came up with some cartoon, or played around with words. This place needs to get back to being more enticing than the next game of NBA 2K14 or the next episode of "Game of Thrones" - making my own art, in other words.

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3 thoughts on “Here’s To Making Art

  1. scott

    Hi Graham. I might suggest that another reason you seem to have Blogged less often is that you are working so solidly in the practical realm at the moment?

    Reply
  2. Graham

    Post author

    Hi, Scott. Maybe there is some truth in that observation but I would like to think that I’ve always been working solidly in the practical realm even while blogging more regularly.

    Reply
  3. Ken

    Thank you for the mention! I want to return to blogging. The past few years I’ve hunkered down, taken a fabricated oath of silence, and allowed my progeny to speak for me. And over me. Hope all is well with you and yours!

    Reply

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