Category: open practice

How to get your blogging mojo back.
In the best tradition of blogging about blogging, today’s post is all about getting started with or getting back into blogging. Recently I have had lots of conversations with folk who would like to blog more, but don’t. Or who feel they *should* be blogging more often, but they haven’t actually managed to do so.

If that’s you and you are looking for ways to get your blogging mojo back, this post is for you. There’s no judgment here. Just some practical approaches you can try to get (back) to blogging regularly.

But, first… ask yourself this question: do you want to HAVE A BLOG or do you WANT TO BLOG? These two things, to my mind at least, don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Lots of people, organisations and companies have blogs. Blogs that might function a bit like newsletters, or communicate community updates. A blog can be a really effective tool for communications and marketing, and as such, you might be obliged to blog as part of your job. That’s not the kind of blogging I am talking about in this post.

This is not about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging itself. The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish. It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own.

My husband-to-be and I often talk about blogging, and he has written many posts about blogging as an OER, blogging as an industry, blogging and academic identity and more. I strongly suggest you head over to his blog if that’s the inspiration you are looking for. Over here in this post, let’s focus on blogging as practice.

Start small

A blog post can be any format and any length. It doesn’t have to be 500 words with references. It doesn’t have to be any particular format. It can be one sentence, one image, whatever you want it to be. Your next post is not going to be a masterpiece, or the great novel you might dream of writing. Start small and give yourself a chance to succeed.

Imagine what you would suggest to a student or a colleague who came to you for advice about how to get started with blogging. What would you suggest to them? What would you encourage them to do? What would be good enough?

Apply those same standards to yourself and start small.

Blogging is not a to do list

Lots of colleagues I talk to have a list of things they wish they had blogged about but haven’t, which covers anything from conferences presentations to new pieces of work. They have an endless list of things they feel they ought to cover, and that can make the task of blogging daunting.

Maybe it works for you to have a dozen unfinished posts sitting in your dashboard, ready to pick up again when your thinking has progressed and those thoughts have percolated sufficiently. If that’s part of your process, then stick with it.

But if unfinished posts or lists of things you ought to blog about are a barrier to simply getting a post out there, I would suggest parking these for a time at least or deleting them all together.

If you are looking for a topic, just tune in to your interests right here and now. What’s in your mind? What is interesting? What are you curious or excited about?

Blogging as a habit

I believe that blogging is a very rewarding habit to cultivate and given that I have blogged for two decades, it must be working for me. And it does. I get a lot out of the process, other than ‘having a blog’. Here is why I blog:
- I’m excited about something I want to share
- I need some space to think through or reflect on something
- I want to document something for future use
- I want to keep a record of things I have done
- I want to journal (in a public way)
- I want to have things to put into my newsletter
- I want to share an image I love and talk about it
- I want to celebrate something
- I want to contribute to a conversation or discourse
- I want to show my solidarity
- I want to amplify the voices of others
- I want to do something helpful
All of these motivations ultimately mean that blogging makes me feel good. I write plenty of posts that no one reads and no one comments on, and it doesn’t make a difference to my process. Of course I want people to read what I blog about, but I don’t focus on that as I blog and its not my main motivation.

I would, and often do, blog, where no one can read my thoughts.

So might blogging do for you? What can you get out of the process? What do you want from it? Figuring that out is the key for blogging to become a regular habit. Just like anything else we try to do regularly, from exercise to reading, blogging has to serve us and reward us for engaging.

Yes, AI-powered tools could blog for you, but why bother?

As a blogger, many of the tools I regularly use now offer me, to put it politely, various levels of so called smart approaches to generating content more easily and quickly. From smart compose to full on writing posts for me. Sigh.

Why bother? The point of blogging is to blog. Why would I outsource that to technology.

Some (fun) ways to publish a post, quickly (with examples)

Sometimes I lack inspiration for blogging, and I still want to do it. So I come up with easy ways to blog, quickly. This often helps me get out of my head and into a more creative frame of mind. It works wonders for taking stock in times of stress and often cheers me up as well.

Here are some examples to help you find your own ways to have some fun, and publish a post, quickly.
- Blog about blogging – example
- Try a different way to blog – such as voice recording
- Blog about something exciting – such as a recent event
- Find inspiration in the season – I love autumn
- Blog about something small – or your pet
- Get involved in a national awareness day or campaign – as I did last month
- Blog about your newsletter or podcast or other output – example
- Make a list of small wins – I make one every year
Right, let’s get blogging. Good luck!

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08/11/2024
Small things. Celebrated.

Every now and then I take a month and celebrate a small win every day. When I blogged about this a couple of years ago, the motivation came from a time of being overstretched, a period during which it felt like no matter how much I did I never achieved enough.

This time round my motivation is different, and more aligned to my desire to practice gratitude and to make the most of a busy, but precious time in my life – when many things pull my focus in different directions both personally and professionally.

Gratitude journalling is a practice that I like and I have tried previously, and yet it doesn’t feel like quite the right fit for what I want to achieve this month. This celebration of small things is more about slowing down and paying attention, to be more present.

The list of small things I have celebrated so far

Day 1: Make a fire and be warm all evening
Day 2: Go for a 2 mile run
Day 3: Get flu vaccination
Day 4: Received a letter with the best stamp. Ever.
Day 5: Went to the beach!
Day 6: Plant care hour
Day 7: –
Day 8: Time out and a nice coffee at my local cafe
Day 9: got a huge box of pumpkins and squash
Day 10: Went to the Theatre
Day 11: Completed the last run in a training phase
Day 12: Decorated the house with a garland which was a gift
Day 13: Tea in bed
Day 14: Went for a run although I didn’t feel like it
Day 15: Signed up for a charity run

I’ll be adding more as the month continues. Definitely looking for the bright spots in these times.

Day 16: Went to the beach
Day 17: Listened to vinyl
Day 18: Had a good walk with the dogs
Day 19: Finished a work project
Day 20: Got beautiful flowers
Day 21: Went on an autumn ramble
Day 22: Had a quiet, restful day

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04/11/2024
Let’s Walk’n’Blog…

Hi, welcome to this blog post which I am not typing but dictating.

It is now mid-morning and I have plans to be getting on with before I have to be at my desk. So I wanted to try and write this blog post as I’m doing things… I’m making some coffee just now and I’ve just come back from walking the dogs. So it is a good time to blog but not a good time to sit at my desk. Hence the dictation.

Recently I had a really interesting conversation with one of my coaching clients around the benefits of not always sitting down to reflect or to write, avoiding being faced with a blank piece of paper or a blinking cursor on an empty screen. Instead, we talked about ways to use technology like dictation software for example to try and give yourself some flexibility. Inspired by this conversation, I went back through a couple of blog posts I have written about how to reflect, and I came across one about using dictation for reflection. From there, it was a small jump to try and use it to write a blog post, too.

Now, just as I was recording this, the doorbell rang, and it was a delivery. One of the joys of living and working in a community around many people who still work in an office, is that I get to be the local delivery depot for all deliveries in the neighbourhood. And it’s so practical to be able to just pause, walk to the door, deal with things and then being able to come back to this without having to run up and down, start typing again, start a new document and so on.

Using voice recording also gives me a chance to write a different kind of blog post with a different kind of voice, one where I’m sipping coffee, thinking about things, having a bit more room to explore, which is lovely. Now, the joy of being able to record voice notes and turn them into blog posts is transcription software. Recently I’ve started to use a different software package, whisper transcription, which is easy to get and great, particularly when you’re a Mac user. And I’ve been using this for my podcasts, but also to make some of my audio resources more accessible. I’ve been finding it a real joy to be able to have a very easy and quick transcription that I get to keep rather than something that a platform that I use makes and then they keep it. It’s been fascinating to produce and then use transcripts of podcast episodes and interviews.

The other thing I really like about using voice recording instead of typing on a keyboard is that I can take my blog activity on walks and get out more. At the moment for me it’s summer, although you wouldn’t know it by looking out of the window. It’s grey and dreary and it’s just about to start raining. But this morning, when I would normally spend time sitting at my desk, I really felt like going out with the dogs to have a nice walk to start the day.

I’m going to spend plenty of time later sitting at my desk and staring at a screen. Being able to make a quick voice recording on my phone and then being able to have the transcription of that which I can turn into a blog post is a nice way of giving myself an opportunity to kind of reflect as I walk and talk. I felt inspired as I was walking and I often have my best thoughts in the morning. I had some ideas about the new course I’m working on, specifically the design of the course. And I thought, oh, I really need to write this down when I get back to my desk.This is a really good idea! I was thinking about the ] course design, which is a blended design in a number of different ways, it’s both online and a physical thing. It’s asynchronous and synchronous and so on. And as I was rehearsing in my mind what I was going to say to introduce the course in a short video, I thought, oh, great, I can just record myself now with my phone, make a quick voice memo and record the thoughts that are on my mind. I can note them down now. When I come home, I can just pop them into the transcription software and voila! I’ve got my notes from my inspired dog walk ready to go for when I want to sit down and get back to working on that video.

For me, recording my ideas as I walk feels like a really lovely seasonal way to create more flexibility in my day, particularly as at the moment my meeting time is blissfully low. So now that I’ve got a bit of breathing room in the summer for the first time in many years, it’s just so joyful to be able to have 10 meetings a week rather than 80 meetings a week. And it’s also a relief not having to have every single meeting be a revenue generation must have rand instead have scope for exploratory conversations to see where things are going.

So, yeah, I think his is probably all I want to cover in this post and I’m very curious to see how long this post turns out to be. Usually when I sit down to write a blog post, I know what I’m looking for in terms of length, and I very rarely write very long blog posts. Sometimes I get into the rhythm and I’ll write something longer, but most of my blog posts are fairly short. And so it’s interesting to see how that will differ in this format. I shall write a little post script to see how many words this blog post ended up being [this post is 996 words].

11/07/2024
The year in blog posts… so far
As I am half way through the year, I am taking a look back at what I have blogged so far, and in the best tradition of the form, to blog about blogging once again. And, if you missed one of these, now is a good time to catch up and bookmark posts for future reading.

Blogging in numbers

2024 has been a good year for blogging (it’s always a good year for blogging!). I published 35 blog posts in the first six months of the year, slightly fewer than last year (43), but still an average of six per month. March was the month with the most posts (thanks to lots of things to say about open education) and June was the month with the fewest (thanks to a deeply relaxing two weeks away and offline).

Top 5 posts
1. Post with the most comments: Twenty years of blogging… now on ReclaimPress
2. Post that was shared most widely: A milestone moment on my coaching journey
3. Post that was read most widely: What happens to our senses in the hybrid workplace?
4. Post that had the most successful podcast companion episode: Six months of gold dust.
5. Post that I enjoyed writing the most: The joy of not working.
January (6)
February (6)
March (8)
April (5)
May (6)
June (4)
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03/07/2024
WiAL Webinar: My Leadership Journey

The ASCILITE’s Women in Academic Leadership Initiative aims to provide mentoring opportunities for academics and brings together its members via a community approach to support each other to progress in academia. Thanks to a recent invitation to speak at an upcoming WiAL webinar, I have started to think about my journey as a leader and what I could usefully share with this group of inspiring and aspiring academic leaders.

My story, like so many of us who work at the intersection of education, technology and more, is not a straight line from degree to equally distributed career arc. My academic background in art and anthropology is not a natural stepping stone into non-profit leadership or project management even though to me it all makes sense (at least in retrospect). So when I share with people that I spent my PhD research in a cemetery and somehow less than ten years later I was the CEO of an edtech organisation there are definitely some curious glances.

To bring some kind of order to the messy madness I have decided to present a couple of snapshots, rather than try to present a coherent narrative. From the beginnings of my undergraduate studies in the 90s, to my PhD years and even much of my early career a lot of my (paid) work involved bookshops, cafes, cinemas and market research. In short, any job that you could do as a young, foreign worker in the UK whilst still attending lectures sufficiently to pass my studies.

When I think about what is important to me in my leadership practice, I think about my values and how what I do and the approach I use align with and reflect those values. Alongside my values, there is what motivates and drives me. Leadership roles can often feel quite lonely and isolated, and the more senior you are the more others look to you for encouragement and vision. Which brings me to the third aspect: developing my own voice.

For me, that process didn’t happen in isolation. I had invaluable support from my long-term mentor as well as allies from the Board I was working with and other senior colleagues external to the organisation. They helped me build confidence, not just capability, and encouraged me to find things I am passionate about. They also helped me step into larger stages, to develop my presence for giving keynotes and writing opinion pieces.

Looking back at that list of keynotes and articles brings back a lot of good memories for me. In those years prior to the pandemic my perspective had begun to expand, and I started to enjoy being part of a wider dialogue. I had found a good balance between having experience and still being new enough in my sector to see opportunity for change. I was excited to be doing what I was doing, and I made connections with people who really opened up my mind to new (to me) ways of thinking, writing and working.

These relationships provided a very valuable network of support and inspiration when the pandemic hit and I entered my first years of permanent crisis as a leader. All risk registers were RED, all of the time. Everyone I knew and worked with was constantly fire fighting. The world had been turned upside down, and education with it.

My voice as a leader during those years of crisis had to become one of clarity and decision. We had to get through it, and eventually, we did. Relationships were both strong in solidarity and fraught by lack of sleep, energy, rest and hope. Like many, the pandemic prompted me to re-evaluate things and having reached a point of organisational recovery I was proud of, my energy was spent and I decided to embark on a period of transition to a new chapter in my career.

2023 was focused on that process of transition, of letting go for a lot of relationships I had built over a period of 15 years, and starting to lay the foundation for my next chapter and a new way of working. What I discovered during that period is that being a leader is part of who I am rather than something I do, or a job title. It’s stayed with me, even though the only person I manage is myself and I run my own little enterprise rather than an organisation for thousands of members.

At this stage in my career I feel I have less to prove and more power. Now I am looking to leverage my expertise and experience to achieve the kind of work life balance that works best for me, to be creative and have fun and to follow where my curiosity may lead me.

14/05/2024
Reclaiming our socials: SUNY Digital Learning Conference 2024
Last year’s experiment in the fediverse, Mission Mastodon, helped me onto a new path to reclaim my social media presence. At the time, I was contemplating what best to do in the face of the demise of Twitter and the fragmentation of my networks. Add a career transition into the mix, and a couple of new professional communities, too, and you will understand why I spent more time than before trying to find a way of connecting and sharing that works for me.

This week I am joining my Reclaim colleagues Amanda Schmidt and Taylor Jadin for a workshop focused on precisely these issues at the 2024 SUNY Digital Learning Conference. The format of the session is very interactive, and should leave plenty of time for discussion with delegates. I am really curious to learn what approaches other’s find helpful when navigating the social media landscape of today.

The theme of the conference this year is Educating for Digital Citizenship and I am super excited to be taking part and learn more about all the topics on the agenda. I am particularly looking forward to the featured speakers: Data, Discrimination, and Democracy: A Conversation with Chris Gilliard and Kathleen Fitzpatrick on Open Matters.

Our workshop at a glance
- Title: Reclaiming our Socials… and how you can too!
- Subtitle: Reclaim Hosting’s journey to demonstrate digital agency
- Track: Digital Activism
- Format: Presentation
- Presenters: Amanda Schmidt, Maren Deepwell & Taylor Jadin, Reclaim Hosting
Abstract: Given the fall from grace we’ve seen various social media platforms experience recently— from Twitter’s transition to X, to Substack’s implosion— now is the time to think critically about how to be informed, and autonomous, digital citizens.

We’re seeing more and more social media users finding themselves immersed in platforms they’ve spent many hours cultivating community and content on, only to feel the rug pulled out from under them when that platform does or supports something that doesn’t align with those users’ values.

At Reclaim Hosting, we’ve always been more comfortable working in spaces that are as open as possible so that we have as much control over our content and communications as possible. Our socials, however, were always stuck with the big-box providers. With the rise of the fediverse, we’re taking our autonomy back. Join us as we discuss the Reclaim Hosting team’s transition to Mastodon, a self-hostable, decentralized social networking platform, and Ghost, an open source blogging platform.

We’ll discuss our perspectives on the current state of social media affairs, walk participants through our open setup, and demonstrate how to reclaim your socials!
15/04/2024