Personal Blogs

Is something of an understatement.

Since I last wrote I have received a redundancy/restructuring notification. In this shake up my job has gone. I can apply for a marginally more senioir role ... in competition with others. I'm well suited to this, but not the ideal candidate. Or I could take a 40% cut in salary (far fewer hours and term time only) ... and again, I am well suited to the role, but not ideal.

This leaves me open to other opportunities around the college, potentially teaching (I am submitting my end of First Year PGCE module today), or coaching - using my range of subject expertise.

Meanwhile I have 20 hours of work to hold on to: 12-14 hours as a digital editor and about 6 hours teaching/coaching swimmers. Not much, but this is at least all year long.

While I approach 60, here I am still wondering what I should be doing with my life. I itch to write, to blog, to podcast, to get back into production, to head up a team creating branched learning (storylines that split in multiple directions).

And I am still an active Green Party Councillor with more important local elections in two years time after some spectacular local wins at the county level the other week - 4 Green seats gained from Zero from the Conservatives. 

Now what? All this and a DNA test from Ancestry says I am 58% Scottish, 23% Northern England and West European ... with 7% Irish and bits of Iceland and Spain thrown in for good measure.  I'd love to see how my wife comes out: her paternal grandmother left Ukraine for Poland to escape the Bolsheviks, her paternal grandfather was Polish; on her maternal side she is all Maltese (though her mother was brought up entirely in Italy, then Britain). 

Who cares? Netflix continues to please. Currently caught in 'White Lines' which I missed first time round.

And teaching has been magic. How many classes start with the trailers for Men in Black and Men in Black International and then challenge the students to identify the standards, values and morals of MIB agents and how these have changed 1969 to 2019. They got all the first three films of the franchcise for homework. We meet again at the end of next week: sexisim, elitism, secret societies, shoot first ask questions later, torture of informants, bribery, corruption and racism against certain alien cultures.

The analytics on your OU blog are none existent.

(47892)

This is my page views since Feb 2010.

That's all I get. Even 12 years ago I could learn every time I logged in the latest 'views' and the views for EVERY page in my diary ... with them ranked, and selected as favourites.

These are VITAL fuel to the blogger, especially the novice blogger who is desperate for signals that having offered their soul to the world that they are getting a response.

I think in my original 1999 blog I went through the 1,00,000 views three years ago (home page), the 170,000 on the favourites (a link into a category of pages) came next with some 18,000 or so on the most read individual page.

This is one indication of interest, the next is those pages picked out as favourites by other bloggers ... simple acts, no need to comment, just tick a box to indicate you're interest in what you've just said or expressed.

I have to say, my inclination to get in the Tardis and pick up on that 1999 blog is strong. It, they were better.

Back then it was a blank page. You needed some basic coding skills and a partner, a designer, always a total unknown, like a copywriter and art director working together.

I feel the loop has gone out far enough and us bloggers will welcome the return journey.

'Wit, auhtority and a love for the subject.'

This is all you need from a blogger you want to read, exactly what you'd like from a journalist. This is a description of the journalism of Sylvia Ryder.

I am first of all a diarist, then a blogger, also a writer and copywriter. I have decade of directing work (some on TV) to call myself a director. I have acted professionally. I even get up and play guitar and sing. I write for an audience. I would call myself an animateur, even a performer.

In this random, miscellaneous, uncatergorised world I am just the words I last put out. I am defined by then, Where they go, how I tag them ... I actually wish I could leave this to others. To wrap up here and say to my team ... you tage, you post, your spread my words where we've discussed is appropriate.

If I compose a song I want to perform it.

Listening to Sylivia Ryder being interviewed this morning (Radio 4, this Saturday) and mixing this up with 'Everything is Miscellaneous' David Weinberger I came up with my own conclusion.

We will no longer make do with the cherry on the top of the cake, placed there because those who know best have made this selection for us; we want all the cheries off the tree (let us decide) and all the cherries rotting on the ground too (it is for us to decide what to discard, not you).

We do and will discard the trash.

Therefore, we must offer at least a pummet of cheries.

This is easy to do.

Sony Flip, video and sound.

Cut in iMovie.

Turn an interview around with cut-aways in a morning.

Cost ?

Time of personnel ?

£100?

Try deciding where the North Atlantic becomes the South Atlantic.

The boundaries are somewhat fluid.

I go back through my OU blog from day one early Feb 2009 and amend, rewrite, 'doube-up' or muck-up this content, reviewing and ameliorating my recollection.

Is this a blog, or re-blog?

It's the same memory. All I'm doing is what we do all the time to make a memory stick; I'm reflecting on it. Taking a difference stance. And depending in good part on my mood thinking either postive constructive things about it or negative destructive things.

Does an amended 2FEB2010 become an entry for 2FEB2011, if for simplicity's sake this is how and when I do this?

You see, I know what happens. As a teenager I kept one of those Five Year Diaries ... I could see year after year what I was doing this time last year, or five years, or far more years than that ago.

Businesses compare quarters, and year on year. All false constructs. All chosen periods of a time.

My mind don't care.

It's simply stuff.

And often you have no control over what you recall in any case.

I smell Swarfega and I am a six year old washing oil from my bike-chain off my hands with my Grandfather. And I see the work bench, the shed and the bike. I can smell his tweed jacket and see his flat cap.

It will be extremely interesting to see how a professional take on looking at OU Blog entries Feb 2010 to Jan 2011 works out.

I think not.

You can keep it private, or share it with the OU community or the wider world, but you can't personalise it.

Nor do you get to keep it afterwards.

Perhaps the OU should offer a blogging platform along the lines of EduBlog or WordPress and treat it as a worthwhile piece of PR, marketing and goodwill.

Afterall, why encourage people to blog for the first time and quickly lose them to another platform?

So what is this?

I don't mean for this to sound derogatory, but dwelling on this through the night, as you do (it is 02.53), I liken this to writing on a piece of loo roll. OK, it lasts a little longer (two years) and can be re-ussed.

Well, I won't stretch that analogy any further.

Scroll is the world I am looking for.

Like a papyrus scroll from Egypt 4000 years ago. Slung up over a line for all to see (or not).

Not a blog though.

Few, if anyone, posts an entry every day, as you would in a journal. Even if you go down the private route, it doesn't feel private, somewhere to disclose private thoughts, health, financial, family and political problems and views.

A learning journal? Part of the e-portfolio package? For reflection.

Yet again, if I am holding up a mirror to consider my experiences this public arena is surely NOT the place to do it?

Somewhere to paste stuff that is over 500 words long ... somewhere to link extended musings when you approach the 500 word mark in a Forum?

Some think 200 words in a Forum is about right.

So how many words for a blog entry?

Blogging mates from a decade ago struck on 1,000 words per entry. We also ran with the idea that is must all spew forth in one go. So in some respects perhaps my lavatorial analogy was the correct one.

I know exactly how you academics and intellectuals and non-obsessive journalers view this kind of thing.

How many characters in Twitter? I forget.

Perhaps the OU should set some parameters in forums and Blogs, as it does for assignments and limit us to 300 words in a forum entry and 600 here?

Or not.

Parameters serve a useful purpose. Give a sculptor a mountain and look what they do. Give me a e-scroll and look what I do.