I have loved blogging with Edublogs since the first post as a blogger but after mulling over the idea of a move to my own domain space for a few years, I finally took the plunge and set up shop at my new home.

https://dogtraxwrites.com/

I hope you can join me there. Thanks for connecting with me.

If you use RSS, here is the feed link: https://dogtraxwrites.com/feed

Peace (and appreciation),
Kevin

Q: What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

I have long been using Edublogs, and the reason is simple: I started here and have found it relatively stable (after some growing pains), and it’s part of a community of educational blogs, mostly at the University level. I arrived at Edublogs at the start of my blogging life when Jim Farmer was just creating the platform. Back then, I could email him directly and get a response, quickly, and even with the quirks of growing pains way back at the start of it all, Jim was always helpful. Later, Sue Waters took over from Jim in many of the daily operations, and she was great, too — an educator who was helping to run a blogging platform for other educators. Nowadays, I have no idea who is running the company. But I haven’t needed any help, either, so I suppose all has been fine.

And so, since I started here with my first blog post (7,445 posts ago!), I have remained here, mostly out of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset. Or laziness. I’ve used a few Edublog sites over the years for my classroom — sometimes, I would pay for premium services and sometimes, I’d go with the free version. We still use a free site for our daily homework blog for students and families. It works fine. I’ve never moaned and groaned about the annual cost. Edublogs has worked out for me over the years.

Which is not to say I have not tinkered for various projects on other platforms. I’ve used WordPress for a Daily Connect site (inspired by the DS106 Daily Create), and for the CLMOOC website (hosted by my friend, Karen F). I tinkered with Blogger at an early point and use Write.As for my daily poem writing. The Manila platform was where I started this whole blogging thing, way back (which I wrote about in an earlier post). There might be others that I have forgotten.

Simplicity and stability are the things I have looked for over the years, and Edublogs has provided that. Which doesn’t mean it might not be time to pick up stakes and port my blog elsewhere, soon, and finally establish a ‘Domain Of My Own’ as many online friends in DS106 and beyond advocate, instead of being hosted by the Edublogs network platform.

More on that possibility to come.

Peace (on the platform),
Kevin

This is one of a series of posts answering some questions about a life of blogging that started (I believe) via Tom Woodward, (maybe via this blogger) but that I first saw via Alan L, Sarah H and Martin W through a renewed push to return back to blogging spaces and away from corporate social media platforms. I am breaking down the series of questions into different blog posts.

Q: Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Way back when, at the end of my first year of teaching (summer 2003), in my Summer Leadership Institute with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, we piloted what we were told was “blogging” for the National Writing Project. (This was just after presidential Howard Dean used a blog to raise donations). I don’t remember the platform anymore and it is long since gone. Oh wait. Manila. That was it. Anyway, we used it to share stories, professional thinking about teaching, for comments and more. Even though we were in the same location, we immediately could see the potential for feedback and sharing and publishing. I sure did, and I even got NWP folks to give me a Manila blog space for my students.

I tried to use the Manila space for different activities over the next year or two. It never quite caught on. The concept was too new, I think, and the administrative elements of Manila were clunky and sometimes unstable. But then, a few summers later, at a technology retreat for NWP out in Chico, California, called Tech Matters, some new teaching friends I met there encouraged me to start my own blog after showing me their new blogs (this teacher-as-blogger was now starting to be a thing).

But I wondered: What would I say? What did I have to say?

I decided to dip my toes in, and created the Kevin’s Meandering Mind name and concept to keep many doors open to wherever my curiosity took me — teaching, music, writing, poetry, comics, video production, photographs, family. While my posts are indeed all over the conceptual map, I know I found my writing voice in those regular posts (during one stretch of time, I was posting twice a day — which is insane. I apologize to anyone who had me in their RSS reader.) Here is my first post, ever. Notice the technology references, including Writerly before Google snatched it up and made it Google Docs.

Back to the question at hand, as to why I started blogging, I think it was to have a place to write, pure and simple. Or maybe a place to compose is the better way to put it.

(see my post from 2009 about Why I Blog)

Peace (wherever your letters land),
Kevin

A collection of short morning haiku poems.

Peace (in three lines),
Kevin

Peace (and ice),
Kevin

Reading Alan Levine’s post this morning about the decisions we make in this social media landscape, which is always in shift mode to some degree, on where we are and where we might go, has me pondering my own presence in various spaces, and so I am using this post to take stock of decisions or in-decisions I have made, or not made. It’s as much reflection as justification.

I suppose I am apt to stay in a place a little too long when things change on me, until it reaches the point of time to leave. I know I am not alone in that feeling. So, I am now finally long gone from Twitter — deletion event — but I lingered a bit longer than I should have. I never dipped much into Zuck-world, at least, because I have always had privacy concerns about his business model (and I think his site designs and interfaces completely suck). You don’t need to quit a space you never entered when the owner goes off the rails. There’s that.

Here, then are some thoughts on my current toeholds in the social world, for good or for bad:

• Mastodon — I have had an account there for about 8 years (!!), and after the Musk takeover of Twitter, I mostly shifted my presence there, and I have found it interesting — the mix of people is very different than my past socials, as educators are minimal but poets, photographers and tech-centered folks (with mostly left-leaning, progressive tendencies) populate my feed. It’s my morning space for Daily Creates and haiku prompts. Yet — I know I can jump to another federated space instead of the main Social one (heck, there is an even a DS106-affiliated home) , and I have not yet done so. Why not? Not sure. Thought about it, often. It would make sense to find a new home for my federated self, but here I am, still dancing in the main Social stream of things. I do support Mastodon through regular donations, trying to do my part to support the underlying notion of federated spaces, outside the reach of corporations and billionaires.
• Blue Sky — I get Alan and others’ critique of Blue Sky, and while I also get the feel of what Twitter once was as a sort of comfort food, I am mostly there because that’s where my educators friends are congregating and I like being in that mix. I am trying to resist the urge to just recreate Twitter there. However, I am significantly more disengaged in those conversations than years ago, and I have yet to take part in a single chat there, even though I have enjoyed chats in other spaces. I do worry about what the site might become, and whether monetization (which does not happen on the Fed) is coming, and how that will impact the tone of the site.  I am ready to bail if that time comes. (This is a difference, too — the emotional connection to any social space has diminished to a mostly transaction nature)
• My Meandering Mind — When I first started my blog, I used Edublogs on recommendation from teaching friends who were blogging, and here I remain. Every so often, when I read something from Alan or Jim Groom or others via Reclaim Hosting, I think: time to pull up and move this home. And then, I don’t. Part of it is that Edublogs has been just fine for me. No problems. No hassles. Just a writing place under an educational umbrella. But then when I think, this is not a space I own myself – I am renting my blog here, and why not find my own place? At some point, I will probably make that shift. For now, though, here I am. My posting has changed over the last few years — focused more on my creative ventures and experimental inquiries, and less on my daily classroom teaching experiences. I am not even sure who reads this nowadays, other than my CLMOOC friends. If you do, thank you.
• Write.As – – I use my Write.As space for poetry writing, and I am happy to be over there. So happy, in fact, that I keep trying to find the place where I can kick in some donations to keep the platform running (and worried about what could happen to all my poems if it all disappears on me). I appreciate the simplicity of that writing space. This reminds me to find the instructions for making a PDF archive of my poems. (note to self on that one …)
• Flickr — Like Edublogs, Flickr has long been a staple of my connected world, a constant space for hosting and sharing photos, and connecting with other people, too. I’ve been concerned over the years when it has run into financial troubles and gone through ownership crisis, and felt relief that the site mostly runs the way it has always run.
• YouTube — Gosh, I wish I had been able to justify the cost of Vimeo when I was using it regularly but I could not. I know there is a federated video hosting space, too, and I think I even set up account at some point and then .. did very little with it. I stuck for now in the clutches of Google, due to familiarity and ease of use. (Is that really still an excuse?)

I think, in general, it is good to be both across different kinds of platforms and still have a home, anchored, as a space to write and share and think. This blog is that.

And one final musing: RSS feeds are still the bomb. When all is said and done, the invention of RSS remains the most important invention in social technologies (in my opinion). Finding Alan’s post sitting there in my RSS reader is what started me here. So thank you to those early visionaries (at Netscape?). Which is why I featured the quote above, from Alan. To me, that’s RSS, even though I know he is more expansive, referring to federated spaces, too.

Peace (through the lines),
Kevin

This is so good.

Peace (and merge),
Kevin

Surrenders at last to the visual

— page 166, Context Collapse (A Poem Containing A History Of Poetry)
by Ryan Ruby

No single word is worth
a thousand images – just
decompressed data files
filling space between air;
where once were poems,
there

This is the final installment of poems inspired by Ryan Ruby’s poem-essay book, Context Collapse.

Peace (in the space where poems once were),
Kevin

Shards that, however carefully arranged,
Are indistinguishable from random
Scatters of letters and spaces on the page

— page 164, Context Collapse (A Poem Containing A History Of Poetry)
by Ryan Ruby

Poem is loop
is poem is
loop is
poem

This is another in my making poems as I am reading sections of Ryan Ruby’s poem/book, and my poems are never a direct response to his book/poem but more a wondering or a wandering off his some of his words and passages, at times taken out of context from his book (but in doing so, remains in line with the theme of the book).

Peace (on itself),
Kevin

I’m not sure what I am doing here but I am in full play mode with the poems I am writing in response to lines and passages from Context Collapse (see here and here and here, for all my poems). In this latest iteration, I was trying to strip all of the words from my poem, written under the theme/reference to paratext (all the writing that happens around a given piece of writing, explaining context, publication information and writer intent, etc.)

Here, then, all words are lost from context.

Peace (like words lost in a cloud),
Kevin