Christian Long’s Stop Blogging Because You’re an Educator caught my eye the other day
STOP BLOGGING BECAUSE YOU’RE A TEACHER (or educator, administrator…)! …Because in a few minutes, days, weeks, months, years, it won’t matter. The pool will be saturated with edu-bloggers. Not just a few hundred. But a few million. Far more than any of us can filter or listen to or blog link or comment on or care about.
Christian’s post made me stop and think about what I’m doing here. It happens. Well, he didn’t, you know, make me do that. But he did touch on something I’d been thinking about. Isn’t that how it works?
I have a like/hate relationship with blogging. Mostly like. But I get wrapped up in a bunch of controversy, which doesn’t really suit my temperament. To my ear, arguments about nearly anything are a waste of energy. It would take me a long time to go around the internet straightening out the whole blog world, and by the time I got done I’d have to go back and start over because they’d all be off track again. So I leave that noble work to everyone else. Every now and then, though, a public minded citizen checks in and sets me straight. I should be more grateful. So they say.
To me, the blog is about discovery and reflection. Not so much about passion. It’s a lot like beachcombing. I read stuff that people write.
I follow links, and follow links from links, heading off in all directions at once. I find stuff and I think, Huh? Where did this come from? Cool. I save it in del.cio.us. It’s a weird obsession. Then I try to make sense of this muddle by writing about it. It’s a system.
Christian’s post triggered some comments about whether passion is a necessary or sufficient quality for blog authoring. Controversy. I don’t know. But the post also grabbed Eric Hoefler’s attention. Eric wondered about why he is blogging and whether redundancy was a problem that he needed to think about. A good question, I thought.
Update: So, I was working on another computer, not my normal one. I thought I saved this piece for publishing later, because I almost never just sit down and write something in one motion. But…I hit the publish button by accident and let it out before I was done. What follows is a rather rushed attempt to button this one up.
Timothy Burke wrote about the life of a blog in a reflective piece prompted by the retirement of Michael Berube’s blog. He wrote:
Mostly blogs ebb and flow with the life rhythms of their creator….However, I think there’s also something about the form itself that poses a problem, and that the problem has gotten more acute as blogging has evolved as a practice. A self-aware blog writer eventually starts to recognize static or repetitive patterns in their posting that threaten to devolve into schtick. Readers may not object: in fact, the larger and more stable a community of readers a blogger has, the more they may in fact come to rely on the blogger to merely convene or spark a rolling conversation among commenters, to be the rhetorical equivalent of comfort food.
For anyone hoping to sharpen and complicate their own writing, or to use a blog for exploration and discovery, however, this repetition and cumulative expectation can become a problem. I’ve talked here before about how much I find my sense of humor drains out of me when I’m writing here, because I’ve gotten trapped by compulsive reasonableness. When I write in this format, I find that my humor is sharpest when it’s snarky and a bit cruel (I don’t think this is true in person), so I often put it aside. There are times where that and other self-imposed limits and expectations frustrate me as a writer and even a thinker, however.
I’ve also hit a point where I’m frustrated by the rigidity of discussions across the blogosphere. …We’ve gone past the point where many conversations had the plasticity to go in unexpected directions. We’ve gotten instead to the point where many participants in the meta-discussion are defending fixed terrain, sometimes terrain that they’re paid to defend by institutions with a largely instrumental interest in blogs as extensions of some larger project.
This quote really moved me to think about the various motivations for blogging, and to wonder if there isn’t a natural lifespan for a blog that exhausts itself like any other project a person takes on. I read widely, and I’m reading beyond the teacher blogs more and more. I don’t know where this blog is going. I’m following an evolving set of interests.
Apologies to all who read my earlier, less considered post. I spend a lot of time in revision mode – and that wasn’t the whole of what I wanted to say. I was shocked to see that it was published when I logged in today. Ah well…
6 Comments
I blog to find out what I think. Yes, I could do that without blogging — but having a blog makes it easy for me to search for things I’ve written previously.
This works better from me than using del.ic.ious.
Blogging, “thinking aloud”, also lets me meet people who (a) are thinking as I am, and more importantly lets me meet people who disagree with me.
Great questions, Doug. I find my blogging motivation changes regularly. Bottom line for me is the intellectual stimulation that is matched nowhere else. I’m not about to stop because somebody sees no future in it. It has value now.
What really intrigues me is what the life of a blog is and will be for the kids we teach right now. Never mind us teacher bloggers being lost amongst the millions of other edtech bloggers – what about our blogging kids? Hundreds of millions of them in a few years. Where is their place? What is their purpose? Will they continue to blog, and why, or why not?
A lot of what you said rings true with me. I’m a mature (?) teacher three years from retirement. i started a blog for my students and I like that, I’m fine corresponding with 10-12 year olds. I thought I had something to say so I started several other blogs. Here’s some observations I’ve made about myself and the blogging world in general in the last 4 months:
1. I hate to write, and I’m not good at it–a harsh lesson after all these years!
2. The blogs I like to read irritate me.
3. Blogging is serious business–you must quote your sources, no room for idle chat.
4. Most bloggers just take stuff off other blogs and blog about it.
5. There are probably only a dozen or so bloggers in the edusphere and they just keep commenting back and forth to each other.
6. Most blogs don’t make me laugh.
7. In a way it’s just like the teachers lounge–people complain about stuff and criticize stuff but don’t do anything about it. At least in the lounge you don’t have to quote your sources.
8. Most blog posts have no comments. Does that mean nobody is reading them?
9. Some bloggers are intimidating and don’t seem to invite or appreciate comments from people outside their inner circle.
10. I’m a talker and talk mostly in sound bites and quips. I want people to listen to what I have to say–but I don’t always want to defend what I say.
I loved what you said about arguing–I agree. There are things at my age I don’t want to spend my energy on. (Was I suppose to quote what you said on your own blog?)
I have found that if I’m not getting much traffic after a few months, I’ll pretty much abandon a blog project. I’m feeling that way about one of my blogs now, because it just doesn’t get any traffic, and it’s been around almost a year now. I may try to sell it, or just let the domain expire and leave it as a Blogger blog, I don’t know.
It’s easy to get discouraged if you feel like no one is reading. My problem in part is because I tend to comment on people’s blogs, but they don’t return the favor, which to me is why so many bloggers probably quit. You just don’t feel appreciated at all.
The average lifespan of a blog seems to be about 2-3 years, with posting frequency going down after about 18 months on most. I find it very telling that of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, only half have been around for over 28 months. It’s like if you hang in long enough, you’re bound to succeed, because everyone else has quit.
It’s a good point, that the longer you hang in there, the more traffic you’ll probably get due to attrition in other blogs. I’d also point out that commenting on other people’s blogs is a good way to advertise your own, esp. if you visit blogs that are related to your own. I like your blog, btw.
I blog because I want to express my view to a niche crowd that I do not have in my real life.
I blog because I want to get opinions from people across the globe, across communities, across professions and social divides.
I am not an educator by profession, though.
Nancy, on point 8, try a statistics counter like Statcounter or Google Analytics.
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[...] I don’t know if my dismissive remarks about certain kinds of criticism gave the appearance of smug self-satisfaction. I didn’t mean to leave that impression, but my last post was a little rushed. I’m self-critical and circumspect by nature, and so I’m often reminded of the Jackson Browne lyric…Don’t confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them. [...]
[...] Doug is pondering the lifespan and life-cycle of the blog: This quote really moved me to think about the various motivations for blogging, and to wonder if there isn’t a natural lifespan for a blog that exhausts itself like any other project a person takes on. [...]
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