I have not used the blog feature of WordPress in about five years. And even before then, I did not use the blogging feature as intended. After re-designing my website several years ago, I decided to disable the blogging feature as my contributions to the blogroll were not consistent, lacked purpose, and rarely used the advanced features for blogging such as tagging or categorizing. However, I have recently decided that I am going to commit to more informal writing again. Now that I am a full professor, I am not at a stage in my career where I have more control over the nature of what I write, how frequently, and where I write. I feel as though now is the time to refresh my blogging efforts and offer the world – in addition to my published research – some ideas and reflections beyond those locked behind peer-reviewed journal paywalls.
In making this decision to start blogging again, I needed to think about what type of content I would choose to post on my website, how to organize this information, and parameters on how frequently I would force myself to write new posts for my website. In terms of the nature of the content for my blog, I have come to the following types of posts that I will make:
- Reflections on my Research: I am going to try to provide reflections on my newly published research articles by provinding an easily accessible digest of what the research means to educational practice and any additional thoughts that emerged as a consequence of the research, such as unanswered questions or future research ideas. If our research is really going to have an impact in education, we need to disseminate our findings and explain what they mean to educational practitioners.
- Software Development Notes: I started my academic and professional career as a software developer, but in the process of pursuing tenure and promotion at UF, my only efforts in software were in the few development courses we offer in our academic programs at UF. Most of my time has been spent conducting research and writing and publishing this research. Now that we have launched the new Computer Science Education program, I feel as though I can dig back into software development by exploring new programming paradigms and applications, including web and mobile application development, machine learning applications, and possible ideas for useful software libraries or extensions to existing platforms (e.g., WordPress plugin).
- Teaching and Instructional Design Notes: Like any educator, I struggle with identifying successful teaching strategies for online and blended environments. I also struggle with adopting new instructional design ideas and approaches for drawing inspiration connected to relevant learning and instructional theory and the constantly evolving affordances of different digital platforms for teaching and learning. Thus, I am going to share some of my thoughts, challenges, concerns, and more in my mission to become a better teacher and instructional design professional. In particular, I plan to spend a good amount of energy addressing those issues related to computer science education because of our newly formed program at UF.
- News Items from my Professional and Personal Life: I have never been good at disconnecting my personal and professional life over the years. In spirit of this, I will try to use the blog to keep everyone up-to-date about any professional news coming from my work life or my research group (DETAIL Lab). Additionally, I will use this category as an opportunity to provide updates from my personal life, especially for my family members that live in three different continents.
While these aforementioned categories will be the broad strokes for my blogging efforts, I will also start using a folksonomy of tags for better classifying and identifying my posts. I will also start to use my YouTube channel more often to provide video content related to my blogging efforts. To avoid content management and security issues, I will not be enabling the commenting features within WordPress as these features can become a nightmare for the security and maintenance of the WordPress instance. Should anyone reading my website have any thoughts, you are more than welcome to contact me directly using the Contact Page.